Call for Papers
IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine
Special Issue on "Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless LANs"
The field of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is experiencing a tremendous growth in the last years. One of the key points is the design of performance-efficient WLANs. However, there are fundamental differences between wireless and wired LANs that pose difficulties in the design of medium-access control (MAC) protocols for WLANs. WLANs utilize wireless transmission for information exchange, which is characterized by bit-error rates (BER) having an order of magnitude even up to ten orders of the magnitude of wired transmission. Furthermore, in WLANs, errors occur in bursts. Moreover, a fully connected topology between the nodes of a WLAN cannot be assumed due to the inherent mobility of WLAN nodes. Thus, WLANs are characterized by unreliable links between nodes, resulting in bursts of errors and dynamically changing network topologies. These problems obviously impact both the performance of a WLAN and its ability to support QoS applications.
Desired properties for a WLAN MAC that have been identified in the literature include the following:
- Throughput. The capacity of WLANs should ideally approach that of their wired counterparts. This should be done by efficiently utilizing the scarce spectrum resource.
- Dynamic topology. In a WLAN, fully connected topologies cannot be assumed. A WLAN MAC should take this issue into consideration.
- Number of nodes. WLANs often need to support tens or hundreds of nodes. Therefore the WLAN MAC should pose no limit to the network's maximum number of nodes.
- Interference and Reliability. Interference, (due to collisions, "hidden terminal" problem, collocated network operation or wireless medium unreliability) should not degrade the reliability of data transport.
- Robustness-Security. In a WLAN, the transmission range of a station cannot be confided in a certain geographical area. Thus, WLANs are more prone to security attacks and eavesdropping. This should be taken into account by the MAC.
- Power Consumption. Wireless devices are power-limited as they are typically battery powered. Therefore, energy-efficient MACs are desirable. This may result in a tradeoff between performance and energy efficiency.
- Quality of Service. In today's wireless networks, there is a great need for QoS, because of the time-bounded voice, audio and video traffic, which have to be efficiently transmitted along with the traditional data traffic.
This special issue aims at providing a timely and concise, tutorial-oriented reference of the current activities and new findings in the field of WLAN MACs. In this context, papers are solicited reporting on representative topics regarding new and innovative MAC protocols. Such protocols should not be based upon or improve already proposed work (especially the work addressing the IEEE 802.11 MAC), but should constitute an advancement by widening the field of eligible MAC protocols for future WLANs. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following list:
- MAC for multimedia applications over WLANs
- Energy efficient WLAN MACs
- WLAN MACs with QoS support
- Adaptive WLAN MACs
- Power controlled WLAN MACs
- Directional/adaptive antenna WLAN MACs
- MACs for multihop WLANs
- Standardization activities
- Performance studies of WLAN MACs.
Submitted papers, which should not be considered elsewhere for publication, should be of tutorial in nature and the authors must follow the IEEE Wireless Communications guidelines for preparation of the manuscripts. For further details, potential authors should refer to "Information for Authors" in IEEE Wireless Communications website at http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/sub_guidelines.html. Papers should have no more than 4500 words, a total of 6 figures and tables, 15 references and 3 simple equations. Please send PDF (preferred), Microsoft Word, or PostScript formatted papers to Mohammad S. Obaidat (obaidat@monmouth.edu) or Petros Nicopolitidis (petros@csd.auth.gr) no later than 28 February 2007.
Deadlines
Manuscript submission deadline: February 28, 2007.
Notifications: June 15, 2007.
Revised submission: July 15, 2007.
Final notification: September 15, 2007.
Publication date: First quarter of 2008.
Guest Editors
Mohammad S. Obaidat
Department of Computer Science
Monmouth University,
West Long Branch, NJ07764, USA
e-mail: obaidat@monmouth.edu
Petros Nicopolitidis
Department of Informatics,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,
Box 888, 54124
Thessaloniki, Greece
e-mail: petros@csd.auth.gr
Petre Dini
Cisco Systems, Inc.
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134-1706, USA
Email: pdini@cisco.com
Jung-Shian Li
Department of Electrical Engineering
Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering
National Cheng Kung University
1 University Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan
E-Mail: jsli@mail.ncku.edu.tw