First Quarter 2012, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

FOR RESEARCHERS and practitioners, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (ComST) has now become the premier source of in-depth survey and tutorial articles covering all aspects of the communications and networking field. At the 14 year of its publication (since 1998), ComST has placed itself at the 3rd position (with an impact factor of 3.692 reported by Thomson Reuters, and the five year impact factor of 8.462) among all publications in the Telecommunications area. Thanks to the great efforts of Nelson Fonseca, the immediate past Editor-in-Chief, ComST has been recognized as an official IEEE journal. ComST is now indexed in ISI Thomson Reuters SCI (Scientific Citation Index). ComST papers are constantly among the most downloaded papers from IEEE Xplore and ComSoc Digital Library. The flexibility in manuscript submission, fast average review turn-around time along with high-quality reviews, and above all, selection of excellent-quality papers for publication, have resulted in the very high reputation of ComST. For the first time in the IEEE Communications Society, ComST has implemented the fastposting procedure for the accepted articles. Access to this journal is available to non-members as well as members of the IEEE Communications Society. ComST has, therefore, become a venue of choice by the authors for publishing their impactful technical work, and consequently, the number of submissions is growing rapidly. Amidst the above achievements and recognitions of ComST, I feel very privileged to have the challenging opportunity to shepherd this premier publication of the IEEE Communications Society for the next two years. I look forward to working with all the stakeholders — the authors, the Editors, the readers, and their support to take ComST to the next higher level of excellence. To provide better services to our authors and readers from both academia and industry, among others, I will explore the possibilities of special sections or even entire issues dedicated for articles related to emerging areas and research trends in communications and networking technology, services, and applications. I will appreciate any suggestion and comment in this regard. To this end, I welcome you to the first issue of ComST in 2012. This issue includes 10 articles. A brief account for each of the articles included in this issue is given below. Carbon footprint reduction has been one of the major challenges for modern communications system. Hence, reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern because of the potential economical benefits