Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networking

Abstract

The annual International Conference on Communications and Networking in China (CHINACOM) aims to provide a forum that brings together Chinese and international researchers and practitioners to showcase recent advances in communications networking research. CHINACOM 2008 is the third edition of this event, which was successfully held in Hangzhou, China, in August 2008. This special issue includes a collection of six outstanding research papers selected from CHINACOM 2008, which is a result of several stages of filtration and selection. First, out of the 822 submissions from 36 countries/regions in 5 continents, among which over 500 submissions were from mainland China, less than 270 papers, including some invited papers, were accepted for presentation, representing an acceptance rate of about 33%. Among the 270 papers, 15 papers have been invited to extend and enhance their work for further consideration for publication in this special issue and six of them have finally been included in the special issue. We would like to use this opportunity to appreciate all the reviewers who volunteered their time and professional expertise to help us reach the selection decisions. The papers included in this special issue cover a diversity of topics in wireless communications and networking. In the first paper, “BTAC: A Busy Tone Based Cooperative MAC Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks”, Sayed et al. proposed and analyzed a busy tone based cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol, called BTAC, for multi-rate wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on the concept of cooperative communications. The analytical and simulation results show that the BTAC protocol is simple, robust, and fully compatible with the IEEE 802.11b standard, and can achieve better throughput and delay performance than the standard distributed coordination function (DCF) protocol and the recently proposed CoopMAC protocol. In the second paper, “Achieving End-to-end Fairness in 802.11e Based Wireless Multi-Hop Mesh Networks without Coordination,” Li et al. studied the fairness issue in using 802.11 at the MAC layer and proposed the use of 802.11e’s TXOP mechanism to restore/perform fair resource allocation. The proposed TXOP based mechanism is implementable on standard hardware in a simple and fully decentralized way without a need for message passing. J. Zheng (*) National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China e-mail: junzheng@seu.edu.cn