Minitrack Chair's Introduction: Wireless Personal Area and Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

The year 2005 witnesses the third occasion that the Wireless Personal Area and Ad-hoc Networks minitrack is part of the annual HICSS conference. This year there was a substantial increase in submissions (thus a substantial decrease in the acceptance rate), indicating the growing importance of research in this area. The minitrack is also focused on fundamental challenges and issues arising in wireless sensor networks and their applications. Wireless sensor networks differ from other wireless networks in the need for unattended and very low-energy operation, in the possibility of collaboration and distributed sensor calibration, and in the mission oriented nature of most sensor networks. Thus our mini track looks at two very important streams of research. After a strict review process nine papers were selected to be included in the program of the minitrack. The first paper is titled “BT-Crowds: Crowds-style Anonymity with Bluetooth and Java,” presenting an interesting idea on how anonymity can be achieved when sending messages in WPAN environments. Our second paper revisits scatternet formation issues of Bluetooth based ad hoc networks thus the title: “A Dynamic and Distributed Scatternet Formation Protocol for Real-life Bluetooth Scatternets.” The third paper is titled “Secure Dynamic Source Routing” and presents a new variant of the DSR routing protocol with special emphasis on security. In the fourth paper, the discussion concerns “Routing Based Feedback towards Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” where routing notifications are relayed via event channels. “A Location Service Mechanism for Position-Based Multicasting in Wireless Mobile Ad hoc Networks” is the title of the fifth paper in the minitrack. It presents some innovative ideas on how location information can be managed for multicast communications in ad-hoc networks. In the sixth paper, “Sliding Window Protocol for Secure Group Communication in Ad Hoc Networks,” the authors propose a sliding window protocol for determining multiple routes in a multi-communications environment. In the seventh paper titled “Ad Hoc Routing Protocol Avoiding Route Breaks Based on AODV,” the authors propose improvements to the well-known AODV ad hoc routing protocol The eight paper, “Joint Scheduling and Routing Algorithm for Ad Hoc Wireless,” presents an innovative and interesting idea wrapped around an iterative algorithm on power control. In the final paper of the minitrack, “Performance Issues of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in a Network Scenario used for VideoPhone Applications,” the authors present a simulation based performance analysis of different ad hoc routing protocols using the application pointed to in the title. These papers highlight some of the issues and work towards solutions in Personal Area and ad hoc networks which are among the most active research fields in wireless networking. We believe that the papers will provide opportunities for researchers to come together and discuss and debate the results of the interesting experiments that are described in the papers. We are confident that the minitrack will achieve its goal of bringing together leading researchers, to present new results and discuss synergies between the two areas. We also take this opportunity to thank all the reviewers for their valuable and professional work as well as all the authors who submitted papers and thus helped us to create such a strong minitrack. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the conference organizers for their hard work and help.