Special section on pervasive wireless networking

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to introduce this special section of the Journal, presenting advanced solutions for some of the key research challenges in wireless networks. The special section collects extended papers from the 13th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, WoWMoM 2012. Future wireless networks will be highly heterogeneous, and will aim to provide users with pervasive communications facilities, requiring for this purpose that many different types of networking paradigms co-exist in harmony. Papers in this special section cover many of the most significant paradigms in this context, including vehicular networks, wireless infrastructure networks, mesh networks and self-organizing networks (supported by opportunistic networking technologies). In particular, the papers presented in this section address a selection of extremely important open issues, including the dissemination of safety messages in vehicular networks, the understanding and modeling of human mobility, the mitigation of collisions in WLAN, the issue of privacy in Wi-Fi as well as routing in multihop wireless networks.