Editorial: Special Issue on Serving and Managing Users in a Heterogeneous B3G Wireless World—Requirements, New Research Challenges, Emerging Solutions

Abstract

Enormous research, standardization and development efforts continue to be allocated in all areas related to wireless communications. These efforts result to a powerful, high-speed infrastructure that offers several wireless/mobile connectivity solutions to the digital information society. Currently, thewireless landscape includes several RadioAccess Technologies (RATs), e.g., 2.5G/3G/4G mobile infrastructures, the suite of IEEE 802 wireless technologies, Digital Audio/Video Broadcasting (DAB/DVB). Moreover, significant research effort is dedicated to the elaboration of the era of wireless communications, Beyond the 3rd Generation (B3G), in which the available RATs will form an heterogeneous infrastructure that will have to exist in an environment also characterized by the advance of the Internet, the need for broadband everywhere, the convergence of digital industries, the advance of e-commerce, deregulation and globalization, and above all the fact that services and applications are key: the end user is interested in services and applications, and should be served and managed in a way that the underlying infrastructure complexity is abstracted. Moreover, future systems should be sufficiently flexible to match the unpredictable operator and user expectations from a service and economic perspective. In response to the characteristics above, future wireless systems shall respond to versatile requirements, such as the fact that users shall be in control through intuitive interactions with applications, services, and devices. Those services and applications will be personalized, ambient-aware, and adaptive, provided ubiquitously from the user viewpoint. In addition, machines (autonomously communicating devices) shall operate irrespective of place and network, and with agreed quality-of-service (QoS). Those issues allow users, application developers, service and content providers, network operators, and manufactures to efficiently and flexibly create new services and business models based on the component-based architecture of the wireless world. In the light of the aspects above, the goal of this special issue is to present advances in various research areas related to the B3G wireless world, relevant applications, services, and infrastructure technologies. In this respect, a great variety of interesting issues are tackled,