Special issue on ubiquitous wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks are becoming promising communication technologies for broadband wireless access by providing wireless backbone to mobile devices over multi-hop wireless communication systems. This emerging technology has a great potential for ubiquitous wireless network access anywhere and anytime. A number of wireless networking and communication technologies that support ubiquitous wireless services and applications are currently in wide spread use. Wi-Fi and WiMax-basedwirelessmesh networks are the examples of such technologies currently under deployment, fostering broadband wireless network access and supporting different communication ranges. While these technologies provide flexible communication compared with wired networks and single hop communication models, they are still restricted to the existing wireless backbone coverage. The convergence of ubiquitous computing and networking with wireless and mobile networking technologies opens a path to a promising opportunity for ubiquitous wireless mesh networks and services. Indeed, this provides a great potential for enabling ubiquitous wireless network access in the next generation mobile networks. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of networks, devices and services, ubiquitous multi-hop wireless access technology introduces new research challenges in all areas of network protocol stack, including security, interoperability and performance challenges. The main aim of this special issue of the International Journal of Communication Systems is to address some of the challenges described above and to publish state-of-the-art research results in the area of ubiquitous wireless mesh networks, with focus on innovative architectures, networking protocols, communication models, services and applications. We hope that this issue will be a useful reference for current and future research in the area of ubiquitous wireless mesh networks. We received 24 papers for this special issue from researchers across the globe. Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers. Owing to space limitations we have accepted only four papers. The acceptance rate for this special issue is about 17%. The selected papers address important topics in wireless mesh networks covering security, cross-layer-based solutions for channel assignment, forward error correction and dynamic frame aggregation schemes. The first article, ‘FLSAC: A New Scheme to Defend against Greedy Behavior in Wireless Mesh Networks’ authored by Djahel and Nait-Abdesselam proposes a fuzzy logic-based scheme to