Radio Resource Management for Wireless Internet

It is anticipated that there will be a strong market for a rich variety of wireless internet-based multimedia devices in the not-too-distant future. It is quite difficult to predict the nature of these devices as well as the corresponding applications; but it is certain that those devices and applications will have very different QoS, rate, delay and power constraints. Arguably, effective management of radio resources (through techniques such as interference management and cancellation, dynamic resource allocation and control, packet scheduling and call admission control) is not only essential in future networks, but is also the key factor in the efficient and affordable deployment and operation of these networks. Proportional to its importance, radio resource management appears to be an immensely complex task as well in future wireless networks. However, it is not yet clear whether this task is inherently difficult or whether it only appears so due to our lack of sufficient understanding of this multidimensional problem. As deeper insight into this field is developed by researchers, it is foreseeable that very efficient and straightforward (although suboptimal) algorithms can be developed. Research activities towards 4th generation mobile communication networks have already started; in the meanwhile, the standards for the 3rd generation networks are continuously being revised for higher performance. Not surprisingly, one main area of focus in all these activities is the better management of radio resources. This Special Issue is composed of nine papers (the first three of which are invited papers from the industry) discussing various aspects of radio resource management within the framework of wireless internet. The first invited paper, authored by Shalini Periyalwar et al. (Nortel Networks, Canada), is a visionary one in which radio resource management related issues are discussed for the envisioned future mobile broadband wireless networks. In the second invited paper, Werner Mohr (Siemens, Germany) presents an analytical model for estimating the spectrum demand for beyond-3G mobile networks, based on projected data rate requirements. In the third and final invited paper, Ralph Gholmieh (Ericsson, USA) and Farideh Khaleghi discuss one important feature in the recently revised version of the IS-2000 standard, the control-hold mode, which aims to maximize the throughput in the forward link. In the paper entitled ‘Linear successive interference cancellation in DS-CDMA systems’, Fredrik Berggren and S. Ben Slimane analyze the capacity performance of a receiver with interference cancellation capability which is supported by a novel interference cancellation-aware power control algorithm. The following two papers discuss different aspects of scheduling in CDMA networks. The first paper, authored by Sonia Aissa, Amine Maaref and Paul Mermelstein, proposes a novel flow control algorithm for multi-rate networks with interference cancellation, while the second paper authored by Tao Shu and Zhisheng Niu, demonstrates the optimum method of choosing (with respect to throughput maximization) concurrently transmitting data users. The paper authored by Walid Ibrahim, John W. Chinneck and Shalini Periyalwar, proposes a novel QoS-based charging and resource allocation framework which may potentially allow the network operators to pursue a wide variety of policy options. In the paper entitled ‘Radio resource management techniques for UE-MAC in 3GPP W-CDMA systems’, Sheng-Tzong Cheng and Jian-Liang Lin investigate the adverse effects of rapid transmission rate changes on the BER and they