Call for Papers for Special Issue on

Service-Oriented Broadband Wireless Network Architecture

IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine

In the past few years, broadband wireless networks have been very attractive for providing broadband access because of quick and cost-effective deployments. In addition to the features of high data rate and large coverage, broadband wireless networks also promise to rapidly provide broadband access to locations in the world's rural and developing areas where broadband is currently unavailable, as well as competing for urban market shares. Till now, most existing efforts have been focused the basic "access" capability. However, to successfully deploy and operate broadband wireless networks, a crucial issue must be addressed: "How to support a variety of services and applications within the broadband wireless networks?" For instance, there is an increasing need to efficiently support applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), video streaming, music downloading, IP TV and many others.

Apparently, existing "access-oriented" design may not be the good answer because of the following reasons. (1) Efficiency: Existing design may not be able to fully exploit the potential of wireless networks because a customer always needs to connect to an access point, which is very likely a bottleneck. (2) Quality of service: For many existing designs that are developed to gain Internet access, the customer may not be able to obtain the desired quality-of-service (QoS) because all services are provided by the Internet, which can only provide best-effort services in practice. (3) Incentive of the service provider: One critical issue that has been largely ignored is that the access-oriented design may not be fair to the service provider who develops the infrastructure, because the service provider can only earn the access fee, which is usually paid monthly and is relatively low compared to the deployment cost.

To address the above issues, the service-oriented design on the network layer has been proposed recently and has gained increasing interests from both the research and industrial communities. With such a momentum, there is an urgent need to better understand as well as to keep track of cutting edge research on the service-oriented broadband wireless network architecture. We plan this special issue to help address that need, as well as to help researchers looking to jump on the bandwagon. Therefore, the special issue will focus on recent advances as well as survey papers in service-oriented broadband wireless network architecture.

Scope of Contributions

The papers in this feature topic will focus on state-of-the-art research in various aspects of service-oriented broadband wireless network architectures. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include, but not limited to the following:

Articles should be tutorial in nature and should be written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the article. However, papers presenting original contributions will also be considered, as long as the presentation is accessible and the paper length is kept within the appropriate limits. Articles should not exceed 4500 words. Figures and tables should be limited to a combined total of six. For manuscript submission, authors should follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine manuscript format described in the "Information for Authors" at http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/sub_guidelines.html. There will be one round of reviews and acceptance will be limited to the papers needing only moderate revisions. Therefore, the quality of initially submitted manuscripts is very important. Prospective authors should submit the all-in-one PDF version of their complete manuscripts (which should be compressed if the file size exceeds 1 MB) via email to lukejie@ece.uprm.edu before December 1, 2008. The other important dates for this special issue are given as follows:

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission: December 1, 2008
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2009
Final Manuscript Due: May 15, 2009
Publication: August 2009

Guest Editors

The contact information of the Guest Editors for this Special Issue is given below:

Yi Qian
Advanced Network Technologies Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8920
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8920
Tel: +1-301-975-5190
Fax: +1-301-975-6238
Email: yqian@ieee.org

Kejie Lu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
Mayaguez, Puerto Rico 00681
Tel.: +1-787-832-4040 x3510
Fax: +1-787-831-7564
Email: lukejie@ece.uprm.edu

Sastri Kota
Harris Corporation
1134 East Arques Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94086, USA
Tel.: +1-408-990-8301
Fax: +1-408-990-8399
Email: skota@harris.com

Giovanni Giambene
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
Università degli Studi di Siena
Via Roma, 56 Siena, 53100, Italy
Tel.: +39-0577-234603
Fax: +39-0577-263602
Email: giambene@unisi.it