IEEE Wireless Communications - Special Issue Announcement
Voice over Wireless Local Area Network
The market for wireless local area network (WLAN) has been experiencing a
tremendous growth in recent years, as evidenced by the fast increasing
popularity of WLAN hotspots deployed in residence, enterprise and public
areas such as airports, campuses, conference venues, shopping malls, and
exhibitions. Meanwhile, WLAN services are evolving from the best effort
data services to real-time applications with a certain level of quality-of-
service (QoS) provisioning. In the near future, voice over IP (VoIP) is
expected to be extended from the Internet to the wireless domain via WLAN.
An 802.11-based phone system is generally less expensive to install and
support than a wired system. A significant benefit of mixing telephone
traffic with data on a WLAN is to support user mobility and to make use of
a common infrastructure.
However, unlike cellular networks where dedicated channels are assigned
to voice traffic, the voice packets in WLAN are multiplexed with other data
traffic. DCF (distributed Coordination Function) is the primary operation
mode of WLAN, which introduces significant delay jitters. Investigation of
voice packet delay/jitter performance over 802.11/DCF mode is a necessary
and challenging problem. The 802.11e group is currently working on QoS
support in WLAN, but the ratification of the standard has a long way to go.
Until then, development of VoWLAN QoS proprietary schemes is essential to
prioritize traffic on the network for QoS support to real-time traffic. In
addition, it is necessary that voice over WLAN has handover capability
across WLANs and/or hybrid WLAN-cellular networks. Improved WLAN security,
WPA and WPA2, introduces unacceptable high delays for VoWLAN during session
switching, and 802.11r is going to address the issue. The next generation
wireless access technology (NGWA), such as WiMax and its mobility
enhancement 802.16e and IEEE802.20, is above the horizontal. The new
technology and standard migration and investment protection should also be
considered.
The objective of this special issue is to disseminate the state-of-the-
art R&D results on VoWLAN, to facilitate the deployment of VoWLAN, and to
bring together researchers from both academia and industry in networking,
wireless communications, and mobile computing, with the goal of fostering
interaction among them. We seek previously unpublished papers that offer
novel research contributions in all aspects of Voice over WLAN. The topics
of interest include, but are not limited to:
• VoWLAN network architecture
• VoWLAN QoS support and performance analysis
• Friendly coexistence with other WLAN applications
• Network capacity analysis and estimation in residence, enterprise and
public area
• Seamless handover across WLAN/Cellular/NGWA
• Billing and accounting model
• VoWLAN protocols
• VoWLAN call admission control
• VoWLAN deployment
• VoWLAN and Mobile IP
• QoS performance impact of VoWLAN security with 802.11r
• Codec algorithms
• Licensed-Exempt (LE) coexistence
• IEEE802.11e based QoS protocol design
• Smooth technology transition to NGWA
• Heterogeneous wireless VoIP (WLAN and 3G/4G integration)
• VoWLAN using WiMax mesh as (part of) core network
Authors wishing to submit papers should send an electronic version
(postscript or PDF files ONLY) with a separate cover letter, which contains
the paper title, authors with affiliations, and a 200-word abstract, to one
of the Guest Editors:
Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, University of Waterloo, Canada, xshen@bbcr.uwateloo.ca
Yi-Bing Lin, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, ROC, liny@csie.nctu.edu.tw
Ai-Chung Pang, National Taiwan University, Taiwan, ROC, acpang@csie.ntu.edu.tw
Jianping Pan, NTT MCL Inc., USA, jpan@nttmcl.com
Schedule:
Submission deadline: August 1, 2005
Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2005
Camera-ready paper deadline: February 1, 2006
Scheduled publication date: April 1, 2006
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