Special issue: advances in mobile and wireless networks

Abstract

Research and development in wireless and mobile networks and services have been going on for some time, reaching the stage of products. Nowadays, mobile communication technologies play more and more important role in all human activities (health, education, entertainment, commerce, environment . . .). Mobile equipments are nearly used anywhere by all people. Graceful evolution of networks, new access schemes, flexible and energy-aware protocols, increased variety of services and applications, network reliability and availability, and security are some of the present and future challenges that have to be met. This special issue selects twelve best papers from the 13th IFIP Conference on Personal Wireless Communications (PWC’2008) and 10th IFIP Conference on Mobile and Wireless Communications Networks (MWCN’2008) accepted papers. PWC’2008 and MWCN’2008 were jointly held in Toulouse, France, from September 30 to October 2, 2008. These papers were selected by the scientific program committee and extended and revised. They present some advances on hot topics on wireless and mobile communication systems and protocols. Contributions of these papers are summarized as follows: Wenning et al. focus on routing in wireless sensor networks taking into account disaster detection in environmental scenarios. They present a proactive routing approach that is aware of the node’s destruction threat and adapts the routes accordingly, before node failure results in broken routes, delay and power consuming route re-discovery. The performance of the presented routing scheme is evaluated and compared to OLSR-based routing.