IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine (Special Issue)

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of the number of wireless technologies available to access the Internet. While the emergence of these new technologies can enable truly ubiquitous Internet access, it also raises issues with the dependability of the Internet service delivered to users. Indeed, wireless Internet access is, when compared to traditional wired access solutions, more prone to security attacks and less predictable in terms of the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by users. This poses serious challenges to the provisioning, in this context, of a dependable Internet service that meets the users’ requirements in terms of security, QoS, reliability and availability, among others.

In order to meet the above requirements on dependability, new solutions such as security and QoS mechanisms need to be designed for the wireless access. Several issues need to be addressed in the design of such dependable wireless solutions, including the following: (1) the open nature of radio communications provides serious exposure to security attacks; (2) the limited capacity and shared nature of the wireless medium complicates the provisioning of Quality of Service; (3) inherently unpredictable wireless channel characteristics make it hard to guarantee availability; (4) exploitation of resources due to selfish and malicious behavior is difficult to prevent; (5) the emergence of new paradigms, such as opportunistic spectrum usage and self-organizing networks, promise improvements but introduce new challenges to dependability.

This special issue will focus on recent research results on dependability issues with ubiquitous wireless access in the context of wireless technologies including WLAN, cellular and broadcast systems, ad-hoc and mesh networks, among others. Topics of interest include, although are 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. All submissions will be reviewed based on technical merit and relevance. Mathematical equations should not be used (in justified cases up to three simple equations could be allowed, provided the consent of the Guest Editors). Articles should have no more than 4,500 words, 6 tables/figures, or 15 references. Guidelines for prospective authors can be found on-line at http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/pub_guidelines.html. Please send PDF (preferred), Microsoft Word, or PostScript formatted papers to Albert Banchs (banchs@it.uc3m.es) no later than 1 December 2007. Accepted papers will also be included in Wireless Communications Interactive (WCI), the online version of Wireless Communications Magazine.

Important dates: