Quality of service in heterogeneous wired/wireless networks

Abstract

Recent technological developments in broadband peer-topeer and overlay networks, wireless and mobile networks, and grid computing have led to a wide variety of new challenging problems. These include the provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS), survivability, resilience and scalability in a wide range of emerging applications—such as large-scale multimedia systems—across both wired and wireless networks. Many aspects of the challenges should be considered, including the QoS provisioning, performance optimization, cross-layer design, resilience, scalability and survivability of distributed applications in heterogeneous networks. The special issue consists of eight papers addressing recent cutting edge research and state-of-the-art technology of multimedia QoS support in heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. It is timely and valuable for those involved in the research areas. The first three papers propose novel energy efficient algorithms to improve the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the first paper “Localized Coverage Boundary Detection for Wireless Sensor Networks”, Zhang, Zhang, and Fang propose two deterministic, localized algorithms for coverage boundary detection in WSNs. The algorithms are based on two novel computational geometric techniques called localized Voronoi and neighbour embracing polygons. They are truly distributed and localized by merely needing the minimal position information of one-hop neighbours and a limited number of simple local computa-