Call for Papers
\nIEEE Communications Magazine<\/p>\n
Feature Topic on Advances in Cooperative Wireless Networking<\/p>\n
Over the last few years, fundamental research has demonstrated the great potential of cooperative wireless networking in increasing the system capacity and enlarging the coverage area as well as enhancing the quality-of-service (QoS) by taking advantage of the cooperative diversity and multiplexing. Consequently, cooperative wireless networking has become one of the widely recognized features for the future wireless communication systems. While the conventional research mainly focused on relatively simple cooperative relay topologies or on the cooperation schemes under the existing infrastructure networks, cooperative networking for the future wireless systems has its unique spectrum of features. Specifically, the frequent user cooperation and interaction empower the mobile users with a new role as the mobile-service providers, comparing with their traditional role as only the consumers. In this sense, mobile users\u2019 cooperation strategy and decisions are sensitive to not o!
\nnly the QoS requirements of the end users\u2019 applications but also their own benefits as rewards for providing the mobile-services. Moreover, the cooperation provided by mobile users does not have to rely heavily on the infrastructure networks.<\/p>\n
Towards these unique features, many challenges are imposed in cooperative communications for future wireless networks. First, physical-layer signals are required to be capable of achieving cooperative diversity and multiplexing gain across multiple coexisting multi-hop cooperation links. Second, the user cooperation highly depends on the positions of mobile users, which vary frequently and are hard to control by the infrastructure networks. Thus, to gain significant performance improvement through cooperation, distributed medium access control and routing protocols are expected to play the vital role in the fast cooperative-network reconfiguration. Third, since mobile users serve as both service providers and consumers, wireless-resource competition\/negotiation strategies among cooperative users and the infrastructure networks become the extremely important issues. Fourth, the user cooperations at different protocol layers have diverse features and challenges, which motivate!
\ncross-layer design to develop optimized cooperation schemes. Fifth, given the frequent data exchanging, forwarding, and relaying among mobile users, the trust management and related problems need to be thoroughly studied for secure cooperation with protection of mobile users\u2019 privacy. Finally, due to the limited spectrum resources, the combination of user cooperation and the cognitive radio technologies is promising to further achieve significant performance gains.<\/p>\n
The topic on cooperative networking has attracted intensive attentions from researchers in not only academia, but also industry. Inspired by the attractive features and potential benefit from cooperative networking, industry has made significant efforts on the implementation of cooperative networks. Cooperative relay has been proposed in the 802.16j MMR (Mobile Multi-hop Relay) standard. Also, many coordinated multi-cell space-frequency coding have been suggested in the standardization bodies such as 3GPP LTE.<\/p>\n
Despite the large amount of research work proposed in recent years, the aforementioned issues for cooperative networking towards future wireless systems still remain open problems. We plan this feature topic to address the urgent need in both industry and the research community to better understand the recent progress and potential research directions on cooperative networking.<\/p>\n
The papers in this feature topic will focus on state-of-the-art research in various aspects of cooperative wireless networking. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include, but not limited to the followings:<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Distributed MIMO technologies for multi-link and \u00a0multi-hop cooperative wireless transmissions;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 QoS-driven resource allocation for multi-hop cooperative wireless networking;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Power-efficient MAC layer protocol for wireless cooperative relay networks;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Network layer protocol for self-configuration and routing in wireless cooperative relay networks;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Wireless cooperative network coding;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Trust mechanism for cooperation among mobile users;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Cross-layer design and optimization with QoS provisioning for cooperative wireless networking;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 User-centric frameworks and solutions for QoS satisfactions in cooperative wireless networks;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Packet-level and signal-level cooperative wireless multicast;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Multi-hop user-cooperation protocol design in cognitive radio networks;
\n\u2022 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Cooperative game for resource competition\/negotiation in wireless networks.<\/p>\n
Manuscript Submission Articles should be tutorial in nature and written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the article. References should be limited to 10, figures and tables to a combined total of 6 (mathematical equations should be avoided). Paper length should not exceed 4,500 words. Complete guidelines can be found at\u00a0http:\/\/dl.comsoc.org\/livepubs\/ci1\/info\/sub_guidelines.html<\/a>. All articles must be submitted through the IEEE Manuscript Central athttp:\/\/mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80\/commag-ieee<\/a>.<\/p>\n Submission Schedule<\/p>\n Manuscript Submission: November 15, 2010 Guest Editors<\/p>\n Xi Zhang Jiangzhou Wang
\nNotification of acceptance: February 1, 2011
\nFinal Manuscript Due: March 1, 2011
\nPublication: May 2011<\/p>\n
\nTexas A&M University, USA
\nE-mail:\u00a0xizhang@ece.tamu.edu<\/a><\/p>\n
\nUniversity of Kent, United Kingdom
\nE-mail:\u00a0j.z.wang@kent.ac.uk<\/a><\/p>\n