The demand for networked consumer systems and devices is large and growing rapidly. At home, in a car or truck, at work or at play, Internet users want transparent internetworking of their systems and devices to provide them entertainment, information, and communications. This internetworking should be on-demand and should be set up with whomever or whatever users want, regardless of time or location. As a result, consumer networking is gaining increasing attention from industry, spawning a range of dramatically different solutions in different environments such as wireless, wireline, and power-line communications systems. These environments have their own strengths and challenges to overcome. The scope of consumer networking spans from the body area and personal area networks to home and wide area networks. In the not too distant future, we will see ad hoc networks augmented with sensors sharing network information that enables devices and systems to seamlessly interact with Internet and wide area wireless systems such as WiFi, 3G and future 4G networks. This phenomenon, Consumer Communications and Networking, has been raising a number of interesting research questions and has been attracting many researchers in diverse specializing areas from networking to consumer electronics. The focus of this Special Issue was to present the latest approaches and technical solutions in these areas. The papers we selected bear witness to the fact that Consumer Communications and Networking promotes such interdisciplinary fusion. For example, in the first article, BTAG a Tree-Assisted Gossip Protocol for On-Demand Overlay Video Streaming,^ by Ming Zou and Jiangchuan Liu, an efficient pull-based gossip protocol is discussed that mitigates the impact of network dynamicity on the distribution of streamed video. The second article, BTime-Aware Disk Cache Prefetching for On-Demand Video Services in a Residential Service Gateway,^ coauthored by Eunsam Kim and Jonathan C. L. Liu, presents intriguing experimentation that makes evident how the Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) system outperforms traditional SCSI-based systems for the delivery of multimedia services in densely populated areas. The third article, BDynamic Service Composition in Wireless Home Appliances Networks,^ co-authored by A. Mingkhwan, P. Fergus, O. Abuelmaatti, M. Merabti, B. Askwith and M. Hannegan, shows how it is possible to dynamically incorporate services offered by independent wireless home appliances within a unique framework. In the fourth article, BRouting Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks,^ Raouf Boutaba, Youssef Iraqi and Brent Ishibashi outline their approach for deriving key design features for routing in wireless mesh networks. The fifth article, BGeneric Forward Error Correction of Short Audio Frames for IP Multimed Tools Appl (2006) 29: 209–210 DOI 10.1007/s11042-006-0014-6