Guest editorial: special section on wireless internet

Abstract

WIRELESS communications have made spectacular progress in recent years. In particular, the merge of various wireless communication systems and the Internet has become more critical so that users can enjoy all kinds of services in the Internet while owning mobility. For example, modern wireless networks can support Internet applications for web accessing and multimedia services. Many issues need to be addressed for such combinations. Host mobility adds a new dimension to many research issues, such as network protocols, resource managements, Web access, and multimedia transmission. For different applications, diverse traffic types should be supported. Lightweight mobile computing devices, such as PDAs and Bluetooth, will be attached to the Internet. Various wireless communication devices, such as Bluetooth and wireless LANs, will be hooked up to the Internet. All these issues bring new challenges. This special section is targeted at the related issues in wireless Internet. More than 50 submissions were received, and 10 papers were accepted in this special issue. The first five papers cover the service issues in wireless Internet. The paper by B. Emako, R. Glitho, and S. Pierre discusses the design, implementation, and evaluation issues of wireless Internet telephony. Y. Lee and I.F. Akyildiz present a new scheme to reduce the link and signaling costs in Mobile IP. The paper by P. McKinley, U.I. Padmanabhan, N. Ancha, and S.M. Sadjadi describes a composable proxy infrastructure that enables mobile Internet users to collaborate via heterogeneous devices and network connections. V.A. Chitre and J.N. Daigle present an analytical model to assess GPRS’s capability of supporting IP-based Internet services. Performance optimization of VoIP calls over wireless links using H.323 protocol is proposed by S.K. Das, E. Lee, K. Basu, and S.K. Sen. Thenextsetof threepaperscovers issuesrelatedtowireless LANs and sensor networks. The important coverage issue concerning the deployment of sensors in a wireless ad hoc sensor network is addressed in the first paper by X.-Y. Li, P.-J. Wan, and O. Frieder. A polling mechanism to support QoS in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs is proposed by S.-C. Lo, G. Lee, and W.-T. Chen. Formation of scatternets for Bluetooth-based wireless networks is discussed in the paper by C. Petrioli, S. Basagni, and I. Chlamtac. The last set of two papers covers management issues in mobile networks. An analysis for movement-based mobility management in mobile networks is discussed in the first paper by Y. Fang, who makes a thorough numerical analysis for finding the optimal mobility management under various network operation scenarios possible. Admission control for schedulingbursty traffic inCDMAsystems isdiscussed in the paper by Y.-K. Kwok and V.K.N. Lau, where six efficient rate allocation schemes are proposed. Finally, wewould like to take the opportunity to thank the contributingauthors, reviewers, theAreaEditor,Dr. S.L.Min, and the Editor-in-Chief, Professor J.-L. Gaudiot. Without their support, this special section would not be possible.