Editorial

Abstract

This is the second issue of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC) published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The first issue was published ahead of time and presented some excellent review papers from experts in the field. We received great feedback from a number of colleagues about its content and we promise to continue producing excellent issues in the future. If you did not receive your sample copy of the inaugural issue, please let me or any of the regional editors know to arrange to send you a copy. We have selected seven papers to appear in this second issue. These papers span a good range of topics in the area. The first is a review paper by Ralph and Aghvami. They discuss the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) architecture and characteristics. Then, they investigate the devices that are supported by WAP as well as the drivers and services. These services include quality of service, security, billing, interoperability, and performance engineering. The variety of media types combined with the diversity of Internet connection characteristics raises momentous challenges to the achievement of ubiquitous access to Internet multimedia content. The second paper, by Margaritidis and Polyzos, addresses issues related to this topic. They identify the importance of adaptation to this category. Then, they examine several important factors that influence the design and optimization of the adaptation architecture. In conclusion, they describe current commercial solutions and future trends in application adaptation in conjunction with recent developments towards wireless access to the Internet. The third paper, by Havinga and Smit, discusses also wireless multimedia networking, but focuses more on energy efficiency. The authors identify three key problems and provide possible solutions to overcome them. The efficient management of power-controlled cellular wireless systems is necessary for their deployment success. Power control can be used as a platform for radio resource management and is important for channel fading as well as providing QoS to individual users. Xiao, Shroff and Chong review the developments of distributed power control and related resource management problems in cellular wireless systems. The discussion is concentrated on achieving high efficiency for a power-controlled system while preventing the system from failure. They then review power and rate control schemes proposed for wireless data, and present a framework for utility-based power control as a possible candidate for distributed power control of multimedia wireless systems. In the fifth paper, Arslan and Bottomley review commonly used approaches to channel estimation. This is necessary in adaptive receiver designs used in narrowband and wireless digital communication systems. They consider both time-invariant and time-varying channels in their discussion. They also provide a number of applications that will make use of this standard. On the other hand, Tepedelenliolu, Abdi, Giannakis and Kaveh talk about estimation of Doppler spread and signal strength in wireless systems. They concentrate on estimating the received signal strength, mobile velocity, and other related statistical channel parameters that apply to handoff and adaptive transmission. They provide comparison of the presented schemes based on their modeling and simulation results. Finally, Annamalai and Tellambura present a research paper discussing three new exponential-type bounds derived using the Cauchy–Schwarz bounding technique. They show that these new bounds are found to be tight and useful for a number of applications. They compare these bounds to other well-known exponential type bounds and prove that these perform at least comparable or tighter. We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue and welcome any comments to any of the four editors listed below. Again, we welcome all of you to contribute and encourage your colleagues and libraries to subscribe to this fine publication.