Editorial for WICON 2010 on “Recent advances in wireless internet”

Abstract

Networks and Applications (MONET). This special issue is devoted to the topic of the latest research and development on wireless Internet. Wireless Internet is quickly emerging as a reality, thanks to the fast evolution of many wireless access technologies. Convergence of heterogeneous wireless networks and the next generation Internet further brings wireless Internet into a variety of application scenarios which provide mobile users with a wide range of highly demanding services, such as high speed data and real-time multimedia delivery. On the other hand, it is of critical importance to obtain a fundamental understanding of wireless Internet architectures and explore new services and solutions in order to achieve the ultimate goal of wireless Internet access anytime anywhere The aim of this special issue is to present a collection of high-quality research papers that report the latest research advances in wireless Internet communications, networks, systems, services, and applications. The whole special issue includes the extended papers in the 5th Annual International Wireless Internet Conference (WICON 2010), which was held in March 2010 (http://www. wicon.org/2010/). In this special issue, we selected 6 papers. The selected papers covered the following important topics in the field of wireless Internet: cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks, multimedia communications, and vehicular networks. A detailed overview of the selected works is given below. The first paper, Joint Spectrum Allocation and Relay Selection in Cellular Cognitive Radio Networks, presents a cross-layer framework that jointly considers spectrum allocation and relay selection with the objective of maximizing the minimum traffic demand of secondary users in a cognitive radio network cell. This cross-layer design problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and a low complexity heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In addition, a spectrum allocation is studied among several cells with the objective of maximizing the overall minimum throughput of all cells while ensuring each individual cell’s minimum throughput requirement. The second paper, Joint Optimization of Power, Packet Forwarding and Reliability in MIMO Wireless Sensor Networks, investigates the reliable packet forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal space time block codes (OSTBC) techniques. The objective is to propose a cross-layer optimized forwarding scheme to maximize the Successful Transmission Rate (STR) while satisfying the given end-to-end power consumption constraint. The channel coding, power allocation, and route planning are jointly considered to significantly improve the transmission quality in terms of STR. The joint optimization design is Y. Zhang (*) Simula Research Laboratory and University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: yanzhang@simula.no