Video is a major challenge for the future mobile Internet as it is foreseen to account for close to 64% of consumer mobile traffic by 2013. Already today, mobile network operators are suffering from the exploding number of subscribers accessing high-volume mobile data services, and this trend is expected to intensify even further in the near future. The enormous proliferation of multimedia-capable portable devices - such as smart phones, tablets and laptops equipped with 3G and WLAN interfaces - has increased the volume and variety of multimedia digital content and related services.

A large portion of portable devices benefit today from cellular flat rates, offered by mobile operators as a response to the increasing users' demand for ubiquitous and seamless access to content. This demand is mainly caused by the exponential growth of the popularity of multimedia web based services, such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, which has ultimately created a large pool of mobile multimedia "consumers". Moreover, user portable devices are typically equipped with integrated cameras, enabling people to create multimedia content in a simple way, and thus dramatically enlarging the population of multimedia "producers" as well.

Current network infrastructures are not prepared to deal with this traffic increase. The mobile Internet was not designed with video requirements in mind and, as a consequence, its architecture is not tailored to efficiently handle a large volume of video traffic.

Scope and Contributions The goal of this special issue is to share research efforts on the design, adaptation and enhancement of IP-based mobile network architectures aimed at providing efficient video traffic support. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Improvements to cellular network architectures (at core and/or access level) for better mobile video support.
• Integration of heterogeneous radio technologies for mobile video transport.
• Mobile content distribution networks.
• Mobile P2P video transport.
• Cross-layer optimizations for video traffic.
• New mobility management paradigms adapted for video traffic (e.g., management of users mobility, handoff process enhancements, app-level mobility, distributed mobility schemes, multicast mobility, etc.).
• Layer 2 specific video optimizations (e.g., 802.11aa, video specific scheduling for LTE, etc.).
• Video-related standardization efforts in the relevant standardization bodies (IEEE, IETF and 3GPP).
• QoS policies for video traffic.
• Testbed, experiments, and real-world deployments focusing on video over mobile networks.

Authors are encouraged to notify one of the Guest Editors about their intention to submit a paper at least 15 days before the deadline, indicating title, abstract, authors and keywords.

All submissions will be reviewed based on technical merit and relevance.

Schedule for Submission
Manuscript submission due: July 31, 2012
Acceptance notification: November 1, 2012
Final manuscript due: December 15, 2012
Publication date: March 2013

Guest Editors
Dr. Carlos J. Bernardos (corresponding editor)
Associate Professor, Department of Telematics Engineering
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Leganes, Spain
cjbc@it.uc3m.es

Dr. Ulas C. Kozat
Project Manager, Principle Research Engineer
DOCOMO Innovations
Palo Alto, California, USA
kozat@docomoinnovations.com

Dr. Joerg Widmer
Chief Researcher
Institute IMDEA Networks
Leganes, Spain
joerg.widmer@imdea.org

Dr. Michele Zorzi
Professor, Department of Information Engineering
University of Padova
Padova, Italy
zorzi@dei.unipd.it