Special Issue on: Multimedia over Broadband Wireless Networks

Today, the wireless Internet provides access primarily to Web-based content and services. However, the emergence and adoption of broadband wireless access standards, such as IEEE 802.16, 802.16a and 802.11a/g, offers new possibilities for wireless delivery of rich multimedia content and services, like video mail, video streaming, audio conferencing, interactive games, conversational navigation services, and future immersive communications in virtual environments. Advances in technology are enabling a world of converged wireless and mobile communications, where users access a variety of media formats using a single device. Some of these novel networking protocols and technologies include IEEE 802.11, 802.15, 802.16, UWB, Mobile IP and its variants, IP paging, wireless IP QoS and SIP. Similarly, newer multimedia standards such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC provide significant improvements in compression, and specifications such as 3GPP Version 6 provide the ability to adapt the multimedia delivery for wireless networks with varying transmission characteristics and mobile devices with different capabilities.

The goal of this special issue is to present a concise reference of state-of-the-art efforts in delivering multimedia over emerging packet-based broadband wireless networks. Specifically, the special issue is intended to present tutorials, survey and original research articles (in a tutorial manner readable by non-specialists) on emerging architectures, protocols and services for delivering multimedia over single-hop or mesh broadband wireless networks. It also focuses on the protocols needed to integrate the application layer requirements, such as QoS, security, etc., with the base functionality offered by the standardized 802.16/11 and other WLAN and WMAN interfaces. Of particular interest is the inter-play between newer techniques of multimedia encoding and streaming and the network-layer features to exploit these techniques.

Following are the topics of interest for which we solicit contributions for this special issue:

IP-based multimedia delivery and services over WLANs and WMANs
QoS for real-time voice and video in broadband wireless networks
Media multicasting and broadcasting problems and solutions for wireless links
Caching and content management in WLANs, WMANs and 3G Networks
VoIP over wireless networks
Multimedia over single-hop and mesh-based wireless networks
Multimedia delivery for broadband vehicular networks
Multimedia services for ambient intelligent and pervasive environments
Broadband multimedia prototypes and system experiences
Broadcast and point-to-point multimedia in indoor & outdoor environments, e.g. homes, convention centers, sports arenas

Manuscript Submission

Papers should be submitted in PDF format at http://colibri.iit.cnr.it. For any questions or clarification, please contact any of the guest editors. With regard to both the content and formatting style of the submissions, prospective contributors should follow the IEEE Network guidelines for authors that can be found at http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/net/ntwrk/authors.html.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: June 25, 2005
Reviews Completed: September 30, 2005
Final Manuscripts Due: November 30, 2005
Publication of Special Issue: 1st Quarter, 2006

Guest Editors:

John Apostolopoulos
HP Labs
1501 Page Mill Road, MS 1181
Palo Alto, CA, 94306, USA
japos@hpl.hp.com

Marco Conti
IIT-CNR
Via G. Moruzzi,1
56124 Pisa Italy
marco.conti@iit.cnr.it

Archan Misra
IBM Research
19 Skyline Drive
Hawthorne, NY 10533, USA
archan@us.ibm.com