The Internet is incontrovertibly a great success that has changed our social and economic world. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes of content, that is expected to rise at more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. It is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, mobile Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens' quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.

However, Internet was designed for purposes that bear little resemblance to today's usage scenarios and related traffic patterns. In the longer term, the exponential increase of the user generated multimedia content and the number of mobile users will raise many new challenges. In this respect, Future Mobile Internet will not simply be a faster way to go online. It will be designed to overcome current limitations and to address emerging trends including: network architecture, content and service mobility, diffusion of heterogeneous nodes and devices, mass digitisation, new forms of (3D) user centric/user generated content provisioning, emergence of software as a service and interaction with improved security, trustworthiness and privacy.

In this evolving environment, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support new innovative applications "on the move", like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. On the other hand, advances in scalable video coding and 3D video processing, dynamically adapted to the network conditions will give rise to innovative applications such as massive multiplayer mobile games, digital cinema and in virtual worlds, placing new types of traffic demands and constraints on mobile network architectures.

Research institutes and leading companies, in USA, Asia-Pacific and recently Europe have started to design the Future Mobile Internet of Media, which will not only radically change the telecommunications and the entertainment industries, but it is also expected to stimulate and enhance creativity, professional productivity and community relations.

Objectives

The purpose of this special issue in IEEE Wireless Communication is to present to the magazine's audience a concise, tutorial oriented reference of the state-of-the art, current and future research in seamless content delivery technologies, challenges and trends in the Future Mobile Internet. Our objective is to present a collection of high quality articles, which discusses the future mobile network architecture, the future service creation environments and frameworks, trends in the direction towards new added value applications, improved perceived QoS that will enable new business models, new ways of working, improved customer relations in any context, and share this vision with the magazines' audience.

To achieve this goal the special issue seeks original research and review papers that survey, consolidate and present the leading-edge research prototype development, trials and early deployment, and performance studies in the following areas:

• Open mobile network architectures for seamless, scalable multimedia content delivery
• Encoding technologies for maintaining the integrity and optimise the quality of experience.
• Implementation and experimentation of future mobile applications e.g. virtual 3D worlds, collaborative platforms and holograms
• Content distribution and distributed caching for multimedia content streaming.
• Peer-to-peer streaming prototypes and their implementation in the Future Mobile Internet
• Search and retrieval of multimedia objects over wireless distributed networks
• Context and location aware middleware for heterogeneous mobile networks
• Innovative, adaptive and self-configuring mobile and wireless applications
• Adaptive, polymorphic and reconfigurable systems for mobile environments
• Cross-layer dynamic adaptation and end-to-end QoS issues for heterogeneous mobile networks
• Reputation, trust and incentives in peer-to-peer streaming systems and wireless sensor networks

Authors are invited to submit their manuscripts as a postscript or pdf email attachment to one of the guest editors, highlighting the reference author of the paper. Detailed instructions to authors can be found in: http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/sub_guidelines.html.

Schedule

Paper submission deadline: December 1, 2008
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2009
Final papers: July 15, 2009
Special issue: October 2009

Guest Editors

Theodore Zahariadis, Technological Educational Institution of Chalkida, Greece (zahariad@teihal.gr)
Giovanni Pau, University California Los Angeles, USA (gpau@cs.ucla.edu)
Luca Celetto, STMicroelectronics, Italy (luca.celetto@st.com)
Petros Daras, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece (daras@iti.gr)