Call for Papers
                                      
          Service Portability and Virtual Home Environments (VHE)
                                      
         The advent of mobile systems of third generation and beyond,
   with their overall procurement costs, will present significant market
   opportunity as well as considerable challenges for service providers
   and network operators. In the fiercely competitive wireless market,
   differentiation with value added service components, personalization,
   and adaptation are critical factors for the success of operators and
   service providers. There exists an urgent need for accessing
   personalized services (even in a network dependent manner) due to the
   introduction and widespread use of portable personal devices that can
   be carried and that could be embedded everywhere. These devices will
   create a need for mobility support across networks. They may behave
   differently in different networks such as the home or the office
   environment and in public networks.
         Present day mobile systems focus heavily on the radio access
   segment, with very little attention paid to mobility at the
   applications and services level. In this feature issue, we will focus
   on services and applications related to VHE issues. The new and
   emerging network access technologies provide different levels of
   service, e.g., in terms of reachability, reliability and bandwidth.
   New open service provision architecture would provide on demand
   nomadic and network-independent services to users, seamlessly across
   multiple Internet Service Providers. The objective of this feature
   issue is to define, create, customize, configure, manage and rapidly
   provide nomadic services on demand. The services created must work
   with any type of terminal (terminal independence), across all types of
   multi-provider (provider independence) and be activated over-the-air
   whilst roaming between different wireless/wireline networks (network
   or wireless technology independence). Original papers are solicited
   addressing the following topics.
   
   Topics of interests include:
     * Virtual Home Environment (VHE) issues
     * Architectural issues for mobility support: IP/Internet, GPRS,
       IMT2000, UMTS, IN, TINA, OSGi, SIP, H.323.
     * Service architecture issues: e.g., Open Services Architecture
     * Mobility architectures and support for 3G/4G applications
     * Auto-configuration, programmability for micro/macro/multi-domain
       mobility
     * Intelligent support and customization: agents, middleware, user
       profiling
     * Service roaming and interoperability across multi-provider access
       networks
     * Support for creation, customization, and management of terminal
       independent services
     * Scalability and adaptation of user terminal to services and
       platforms
     * Address and naming portability
     * Conditional access and authentication End to end QoS support
       including QoS routing, provisioning, and service level agreement
       (SLA) for wireless IP-based networks
     * Security issues
     * Service discovery
     * Content management and XML based architectures
       
         Authors should submit an electronic postscript or PDF copy of
   their papers to any of the guest editors listed below by the due date.
   
         NOTE: It is the policy of the IEEE Communication Magazine that
   each article should have no more than 4,500 words, no more than 6
   figures and tables total, and no more than 15 references.
   
   Guest Editors: Fawzi Daoud, GMD, Germany - Email: f.daoud@ieee.org
   Seshadri Mohan, Comverse, USA - Email: Seshadri.Mohan@comverse.com
   
    Publication Schedule
    
   Manuscript due: August, 30, 2001
   Acceptance notification: September 2001
   Revised final manuscript due at IEEE: October 2001
   Publication Date: January 2002
   http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/commag/index.html