Foreword by Guest Editors for the Special Issue on the 2012 ICUFN Conference

Abstract

Welcome to this special issue of Wireless Personal Communications, which has taken the important role to keep up with the new technology evolution and enhancement in theoretical, engineering, and experimental aspects of radio communications, voice, data, images, and multimedia. This special issue constitutes a selection of best papers from the 2012 ICUFN (International Conference on Ubiquitous Future Networks) Conference. All these papers have been extended and reviewed again by 3 independent reviewers. ICUFN is an annual international conference (www.icufn.org) co-sponsored by IEEE Communications Society and organized by the KICS (Korean Information Communications Society). The first paper is entitled “Software-based Management for Ethernet Networks“. It presents a solution for this use case to integrate quality of service futures for the communication by a middleware based approach. The proposed mechanism in this paper discusses possible design improvements of this solution and presents the recent Ethernet standards that could help to solve this problem in an alternative way. The second paper entitled “Distributed Transmit Power Control for Maximizing Endto-End Throughput in Wireless Multi-hop Networks”. In a multi-hop link, the end-to-end throughput between a source and destination is restricted by the lowest link rate, so the maxmin fair allocation on the link rates is an optimal strategy to maximize. This paper proposes a transmit power control (TPC) algorithm that decides the transmit power of multi-hop nodes to equalize all link rates. The third paper entitled “An Architecture for Service Quality Management Using Cooperative Communications” proposes an architecture for application quality management and a detailed mechanism to maintain the desired multimedia application quality using the coop-