Recent Advances on Future Networks and Their Management

The rapid growth in mobile traffic and broadband wireless connections, together with the advent of the Internet-ofThings call for novel mobile and wireless network management techniques, able to cope with an increasing number of challenges. Individual techniques can no longer be considered in isolation, but there must be a clear cooperation and cross fertilization amongst them. Since 2009, the International Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI) provides researchers with the opportunity to describe and discuss their latest research results. The Call-for-Papers of this Special Issue was a result of the 5th edition of the MONAMI conference, which was held in Cork, in September 2013. The six papers that were finally selected for publication, after a thorough review process in which each paper was reviewed by at least three experts, provide a good picture of the currently most relevant topics within the field of mobile and wireless networking. They give an interesting perspective on some of the most challenging problems and discuss interesting techniques and solutions to address them. From the point of view of the wireless substratum, one of the topics that has received much attention recently is the cognitive radio paradigm. In order to be able to support the increasing resource demand, a more efficient usage of the available spectrum is necessary. In the first paper of this special issue, Sunita S. Barve proposes an opportunistic routing and channel assignment scheme for mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed holistic approach is based on multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques and aims at exploiting unused chunks of licensed spectrum bands. The author combines a number of different metrics to take decisions and by means of simulations, he shows that the MARLbased routing scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions. He also analyses different techniques to carry out relay selection. Another key aspect of the management of future wireless networks is their mobility. Traditional schemes might not be sufficient to cope with stringent new requirements and therefore, novel solutions must be fostered. The next two papers of this special issue specifically deal with advanced mobility solutions. First, Wen-Kang Jia, after providing an interesting survey of existing MobileIP based mobility protocols, proposes a universal IP mobility framework that is able to select the most suitable mobility protocol, for scenarios in which Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 coexist. The author also proposes Traffic Driven Pseudo Binding Update (TDPBU), a novel route optimization scheme, and assesses its performance by means of extensive simulation studies. Afterwards, Li Jun Zhang et al. propose SeamlessMobile IPv6 (SMIPv6), a novel mobility protocol that exploits the multi-homing capabilities of most of current wireless devices to establish bidirectional secure tunnels that are established before handoffs. The authors use the OPNETsimulator to compare the performance of this protocol with traditional MIPv6. The results show that SMIPv6 outperforms the state of the art both in terms of handoff latency and packet losses. R. Agüero (*) University of Cantabria, Av los Castros s/n, 39005 Santander, Cantabria, Spain e-mail: ramon@tlmat.unican.es