Special issue: modeling and performance evaluation of radio resource QoS for next-generation wireless and mobile networks

Next generation wireless and mobile communication systems are rapidly evolving to satisfy the demands of various network users. Due to the great success and enormous impact of IP networks, high-speed transmission is now possible for both indoor and outdoor wireless systems, internet access and web browsing have become the ruling paradigm for the next generation systems. It is envisioned that new generation wireless networks and hand-held terminals will support a wide variety of multimedia services such as multimedia web browsing, video and news on demand, mobile office system, stock market information, and so on, to mobile users anywhere, anytime in an uninterrupted and seamless way with low-powered handsets. The characteristics of wireless links, as well as the desire to maintain connectivity while on the move, offer significant challenges to provisioning quality of service and the related performance is of central interest. Since the resources (such as time, frequency and code) in the wireless segments of such networks are very limited, over-dimensioning the network resource is equivalent to poor capital investment, while congestion at busy hours could mean lost calls and lost revenues. It is therefore critical for wireless network designers to utilize these resources efficiently and effectively. In response to the above demand for next generation wireless and mobile communication systems, this special issue aims at providing a timely and concise reference of the current activities and findings in the relevant technical fields. The primary goal is to address the key technical issues pertaining to the integrated new systems and present novel technical contributions. Ten papers are selected for publication in this special issue from over 50 submissions. Each paper was reviewed carefully by at least two reviewers. The reviewers’ reports not only correct some deficiencies of the submissions but also greatly improve the quality of this special issue. We believe that all of these papers not only provide novel ideas, new analytical models, simulation and experimental results, and handful experience in this field, but also simulate the future research activities in the area of resource allocation strategies in next generation wireless networks. A brief summary of each paper is listed as follows. The first paper by Y. Fang presents a survey on a new analytical approach his research team have developed in the last few years to evaluate the performance of wireless cellular networks under more realistic assumptions. This approach is particularly applied to the analysis of call connection performance and mobility management under assumptions that many time variables such as call holding time, cell residence time, channel holding time, registration area (RA) residence time and inter-service time are assumed to be generally distributed, and show how to obtain more general analytical results. The second paper by A. Jamalipour, V. Mirchandani, and M. Kibria first reviews some of the state of art techniques in the area of QoS and resource management based mobility. They then propose an augmented 4G/B3G architecture that addresses key limitations in the salient 4G architectures examined in the literature. Their proposed novel augmentations in mobility, QoS, and resource management schemes consolidate operation of the 4G architecture. The other defining attributes of their proposed 4G architecture are that it is open, hierarchical, layered, and modular with cross-layer coordination and distributed network functionalities.