Call for Papers
QoS in Next-generation Wireless Multimedia Communications Systems
Special Issue of IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine
Two features are going to strongly characterize the future
telecommunications scenario: heterogeneity of the telecommunications
platforms and personalization of the (likely multimedia) services.
High-speed fixed, mobile and satellite segments, although originally
conceived and optimised for specific service categories, are going to
converge towards unifying platforms in which the users freely and
dynamically decide the way to access multimedia services and to
personalise them through suitable SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
In such a heterogeneous environment, a critical issue turns out to be
quality management and provision to multimedia traffic over the
unreliable, unpredictable and, intrinsically-unstable wireless and
mobile segments of the heterogeneous systems. A twofold exigency is
felt: the user exigency of tools to properly specify and personalise
the requested quality level, and the system exigency of being equipped
with mechanisms which allow to flexibly match the user needs. The main
source of difficulty is that a fixed Quality of Service (QoS)
guarantee hardly matches the complexity of the highlighted scenario
and the unstable nature of its wireless segments. Furthermore,
multimedia traffic characterised by contributions from different media
flows is intrinsically difficult to handle, due to the different
requirements of the contributing sources.
With this idea in mind, the research community has to invest
considerable effort towards investigating effective techniques for the
effective control of the QoS perceived by the user. A winning idea,
strongly supported by the main standardization bodies and accepted by
the research community as well, consists in trying to guarantee an
end-to-end soft QoS level. It makes it possible to cope with the
variability of the wireless/mobile channel during a communication
session by dynamically adapting both the system resource allocation
and the offered traffic profiles to the soft requirements of the
communicating customers.
How to implement it and how effective its introduction into
next-generation wireless multimedia communications systems is, this
still remains to be investigated.
The research issues to be investigated are manifold. How can the user
specify in a flexible way the tolerated soft-quality of their
transmission in terms of perceived QoS? How can the subjective indexes
be mapped into objective indexes which can then be dynamically
modified by the system algorithms to guarantee an adaptive quality of
service? Which technologies, protocols and algorithms at the various
layers of the system protocol stack (from the physical to the
application layer) can be introduced with the aim of specifying,
controlling and managing the soft-QoS paradigm in next-generation
wireless multimedia communications systems (both on the fixed and, in
particular, on the wireless segments)? Are the traditional QoS indexes
still sufficient to measure the soft-QoS in order to be granted to the
user, or do new sets of indexes need to be introduced at the different
system layers? Could the use of Middleware mechanisms between the
application and the network protocol layers represent a feasible and
effective solution to the problem?
An attempt to provide a partial answer to these and many other related
questions will form the main scope of the present special issue.
We solicit papers covering a variety of topics including, but not
limited to:
* Next generation of end-to-end multimedia platforms supporting the
idea of Soft-QoS
* Middleware for soft-QoS management in next generation Wireless
Multimedia Communications Systems
* Technologies, algorithms, and protocols for QoS provisioning and
control
* QoS provisioning at the MAC layer
* Challenges and solutions for the Adaptive QoS management in next
generation Wireless Multimedia Communications Systems
* Specification of user profiles for the dynamic adaptation of the
QoS
* New metrics for the soft-QoS measurement and performance
assessment
* Perceptual QoS evaluation and its mapping onto low level QoS
* New QoS architectures for next generation Wireless Multimedia
Communications Systems
* Performance comparison of hard and soft QoS provisioning
techniques
* QoS Provision in Wireless and mobile Internet
* QoS Provisioning in Satellite Networks
* QoS Provisioning in ad-hoc Wireless Networks
* Video, Data, Audio and Voice adaptive encoding schemes for
wireless multimedia services
* Dynamic QoS management solutions exploiting Neural Networks
* New QoS-sensitive application service models for mobile networks
* Dynamically configurable and QoS-sensitive multimedia applications
* Standardization activities
All submissions should adhere to the style of IEEE Wireless
Communications Magazine. Guidelines for prospective authors can be
found on-line at http://www.comsoc.org/pci/. Electronic submissions in
Postscript or PDF format are strongly encouraged and should be sent to
one of the Guest Editors at the addresses indicated below. If
electronic submission is not possible, please contact the guest
editors.
Time Schedule
Manuscript Due: December 15th, 2002
Acceptance Notification: February 15th, 2003
Final Manuscript Due: May 15th, 2003
Publication Date: August 2003
Guest Editors
Antonio Iera
University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria
Faculty of Engineering, Dept. D.I.M.E.T.
Via Graziella (Feo di Vito)
89100 Reggio Calabria
ITALY
Phone: +39-0965-875286
Fax: +39-0965-875220
E-mail: iera@ing.unirc.it
Antonella Molinaro
University of Calabria
Dept. D.E.I.S.
87036 Arcavacata di Rende (CS)
ITALY
Phone: +39-0984-494703
Fax: +39-0984-494713
E-mail: molinaro@deis.unical.it
Klara Nahrstedt
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Computer Science
1304 West Springfield Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
USA
Phone: +217-244-6624
Fax: +217-244-6869
E-mail: klara@cs.uiuc.eduklara@cs.uiuc.edu
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