TSINGHUA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSNll1007-0214ll0?/0?llpp449-450 Volume 16, Number 5, October 2011
Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Wireless Mobile Computing and Networking Yu Wang1,**, Yanwei Wu2, Fan Li3, Bin Xu4, Teresa Dahlberg1 1. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA; 2. Department of Computer Science, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR 97361, USA; 3. School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China; 4. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Recent convergence of information communications technology and computing is creating new demands and opportunities for ubiquitous computing via wireless and mobile equipments. The demanding networking environment of wireless communications and the fast-growing number of mobile users impose several challenges in terms of channel estimation, network protocol design, resource management, systematic design, application development, and security. The objective of this special issue is to gather recent advances addressing networks, systems, algorithms, and applications that support the symbiosis of mobile computers and wireless networks. This special issue is the first special issue launched by Tsinghua Science and Technology after it narrowed its scope to information technology. This includes nine research articles from six different countries (including the United States, Canada, France, China, Iran, and Malaysia), which covers various research issues in the areas of mobile computing and wireless networking. Among them, four were selected from fifteen submissions through the open call for papers and the other five were invited by the guest editors. These selected papers may be classified into three categories: (1) wireless sensor networks; (2) wireless network security; and (3) wireless algorithms and analysis. A detailed description of the corresponding selected works in each category is given below. Received: 2011-07-18
** To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
[email protected]; Tel: 1-7046878443
Wireless Sensor Networks Wireless sensor networks is an active research area in the wireless networking community in recent years due to the many commercial and civilian applications. To efficiently and effectively support communications among a large number of spatially distributed autonomous sensors is challenging, especially in unreliable environments. In the first paper, Fault Tolerant Data Aggregation Scheduling with Local Information in Wireless Sensor Networks, Feng et al. study how to adjust the underlying data aggregation tree when some sensors fail to support fault tolerant data aggregation. They propose an amendment strategy for the CDS-based data aggregation protocols which can locally repair the broken aggregation tree and reschedule the transmissions. The second paper, entitled Reliable and Energy Efficient Target Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks by He et al., also considers possible failures in wireless sensor networks by introducing a failure probability into target coverage problems to improve and control the overall reliability. The authors define a new coverage problem, the α-Reliable Maximum Sensor Cover problem, and design a heuristic greedy algorithm that efficiently computes the maximal number of α-Reliable sensor covers. In the third paper, An Interference-Aware Multipath Routing Protocol for QoS Improvement in Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks, Radi et al. propose a low-overhead QoS multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks by considering multiple metrics (e.g., residual energy, link quality, and interference level) to
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establish a set of node-disjoint paths from the source to the destination. The fourth paper, LiveWeb: A Sensorweb Portal for Sensing the World in Real-Time by Yang et al., presents a SensorWeb system, called LiveWeb, to represent and monitor real-time physical sensor data and cyber activities from ubiquitous sources. The authors provide a description of their system architecture, data collection and storage method, search algorithm, subscribe/alert mechanism, and possible usages of LiveWeb.
Wireless Network Security Even though wireless technologies have been widely deployed and hold great promises, security issues are one of the most significant concerns and research challenges in wireless networks. The fifth paper, Forced Collision: Detecting Wormhole Attacks with Physical Layer Network Coding by Li et al., studies how to use physical layer network coding to detect wormhole attacks in wireless networks. The proposed approach estimates the distance among neighboring nodes by comparing the starting points of the collisions at receivers and then detects fake neighbor connections in wormhole attacks. In the sixth paper, Lightweight and Compromise Resilient Storage Outsourcing with Distributed Secure Accessibility in Mobile Cloud Computing, Ren et al. investigate the security issues in mobile cloud computing with distrusted cloud servers and semi-trusted mobile devices by proposing a family of secure storage schemes, including encryption based, coding based, and sharing based schemes. These schemes are lightweight in terms of computational overhead and resilient to the storage compromise on mobile devices.
Wireless Algorithms and Analysis Besides these research articles on wireless sensor networks and wireless network security, we also include three articles on algorithm design for wireless networks and experimental analysis of wireless protocols. The seventh paper, entitled LaConf: a Localized Address Autoconfiguration Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks by Li et al., presents a new localized address
Tsinghua Science and Technology, October 2011, 16(5): 449-450
configuration scheme in which available addresses are maintained along the network border using both a geographic routing protocol and a geographic hash table. The eighth paper, Experimental Analysis of Link Estimation Methods in Low Power Wireless Networks by Zhang, provides an in-depth experimental study on the accuracy of estimating unicast data transmission properties with beacon-based and data-driven link estimation methods. By using a testbed of 98 XSM motes, the author shows that data-driven link estimation and routing achieves have higher event reliability and transmission efficiency than beacon-based approaches. In the last paper, Multi-Axis Projection Based Giant Component Formation in Random Unit-Disk Graphs, Hu et al. propose and analyze a simple multi-axis projection based giant component formation strategy to facilitate virtual backbone construction in random wireless networks. In conclusion, this issue offers an overview of the recent advances in several areas of mobile computing and wireless networks. We hope that this excellent collection of articles will help interested readers to identify a number of key challenges and opportunities that lie within these research areas. We hope you enjoy and benefit from this special issue.
Acknowledgments This special issue owes its success to the effort and support of many individuals. We express our appreciations to all authors for contributing their papers to this special issue and to all reviewers who dedicated their precious time to provide timely and valuable reviews and comments. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the guidance and support from the Associate Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Yunhao Liu, and the Associate Editor, Prof. Xiangyang Li. We would like to thank both Prof. Peng-Jun Wan and Prof. Yu Cheng for allowing us to invite two papers from MSN 2011 Conference. Then last but not least, our great gratitude to the Managing Editor, He Chen, and his staff at Tsinghua University Press for their tremendous help during the production of this issue.
