TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSN ll 1007-0214 ll??/?? llpp485-486 Volume 17, Number 5, October 2012
Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Wireless Computing and Networking Yingshu Li1; , Xiaojun Cao1 , Raheem Beyah2 , My T. Thai3 1. Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA; 2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; 3. Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
This special issue is devoted to the new research addressing challenges in the areas of wireless computing and networking. Wireless computing and networking has enabled heterogeneous access technologies for providing services to ubiquitous users. The demanding networking environment of wireless communications imposes many challenges, such as channel estimation, network protocol design, resource management, and systematic design. Due to nonuniform spectrum allocation, various radio resource management policies, economic concerns, scarcity of radio resources, and user mobility, overcoming these issues becomes more demanding. This special issue includes ten research articles from five countries including the United States, China, South Korea, Norway, and India which covers various research issues in the areas of wireless computing and networking. These articles can be broadly classified into three categories: (1) data management and query processing in wireless networks; (2) backbone management in wireless networks; and (3) routing in wireless networks. A detailed description of the corresponding works in each category is given below. Data Management and Query Processing in Wireless Networks As the big data era is coming, data management and query processing in wireless networks is becoming even more challenging and popular in the wireless networking community. In the first paper, “Data Collection Capacity of Random-Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks under Physical Models”, Chen and Received: 2012-09-12 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
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Wang study the theoretical limitations of data collection in terms of capacity for wireless sensor networks under both the physical model and the generalized physical model. The second paper, entitled “Area Query Processing Based on Gray Code in Wireless Sensor Networks” by Ai et al., investigates the area query processing in wireless sensor networks. This is the first work addressing the area query issues. The authors propose a distributed energy-efficient in-network area query processing scheme. A grey-code based method is employed to describe an area such that subareas can be efficiently merged and useless data can be discarded as early as possible to reduce energy consumption. The authors also design an incremental update method to continuously generate query results. The third paper, “Distributed Aggregation Algorithms for Mobile Sensor Networks with Group Mobility Model” by Ren et al., studies data aggregation in mobile wireless sensor networks. A distributed clustering algorithm which divides mobile sensor nodes into several groups is designed, and two corresponding distributed aggregation algorithms are presented. These two algorithms are efficient in terms of aggregation accuracy, energy efficiency, and query delay in mobile wireless sensor networks. In the fourth paper, “A Designated Query Protocol for Serverless Mobile RFID Systems with Reader and Tag Privacy” by Lim et al., the authors introduce a new type of RFID system with mobile readers, referred as a serverless mobile RFID system, where mobile readers are expected to identify tags without a back-end server. A new encryption-based system that preserves the privacy of both tags and readers is illustrated. In addition, the authors define a new adversary model and show that the proposed system provides a stronger reader privacy and robustness against the reader forgery attack.
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Tsinghua Science and Technology, October 2012, 17(5): 485-486
Backbone Management in Wireless Networks
both algorithmic simplicity and running complexity.
Lack of centralized administration and limitations of wireless networks make the backbone management another challenging issue. The work in the fifth paper, entitled “Design and Analysis of Prioritized Medium Access Control Protocol for Backbone Routers in Wireless Mesh Networks” by Pan and Wu, designs a simple yet effective prioritized MAC protocol for wireless mesh networks. This protocol offers strict service differentiation for prioritized packets. To yield important performance matrices, a Markov model is developed. It is proved that the service time of P-MAC approximates exponential distribution, and can be effectively estimated. The sixth paper, “A Distributed Design for Minimum 2-Connected m-Dominating Set in Bidirectional Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks”, studies how to construct a connected dominating set based backbone for bidirectional wireless ad hoc networks. A distributed algorithm is proposed which differs from the traditional methods where usually a maximal independent set is employed. This work constructs a dominating set directly from the given graph, and then connects the nodes in the dominating set by a two-step ring based connecting strategy to satisfy the 2-connectivity requirement. To improve the performance of a wireless router which is a key component of a network backbone, the seventh paper, “Online Learning Approaches in Maximizing Weighted Throughput in an Unreliable Channel” by Zhang and Li, presents online algorithms to schedule unit-length packets with values and deadlines through an unreliable communication channel. The authors conduct theoretical and empirical studies of online learning approaches which are evaluated in terms of external regret. It is concluded that no online learning algorithms have constant regrets. The proposed online learning algorithms outperform online competitive algorithms in terms of
Routing in Wireless Networks Routing in wireless networks is a popular research issue. The eighth paper, “Interference-Aware Probabilistic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks” by Lu and Wang, adopts the probability theory to extend the existing interference model and proves the isotonic property of the interference-aware routing metric. A corresponding probabilistic routing algorithm is proposed. This algorithm can achieve better packet delivery ratio, throughput, jitter and average delay in dense networks. In the ninth paper, “A Switch Agent for Wireless Sensor Nodes with Dual Interfaces: Implementation and Evaluation” by Zheng et al., the authors consider handling bursty traffic in an energy efficient way by employing dual radio interfaces with different ranges, capacity and power consumption on each individual sensor node. They present a distributed routing-layer switch agent which intelligently directs traffic between the dual radios. In summary, this special issue provides an overview of the recent advances in several areas of wireless computing and networking. We expect that this excellent set of articles can benefit the readers by helping them to identify some key challenges and even more potential future research issues that lie within these research areas. Acknowledgments We thank the authors for contributing their papers to this special issue and thank all the reviewers who dedicated their precious time to provide timely and valuable reviews and comments. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the Managing Editor, He Chen, and his staff at Tsinghua University Press for their tremendous help during the production of this special issue.
