{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029551715502128727, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012271475081392437, 'mean_word_length': 5.359872611464968, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 1, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Wireless and mobile network management research in Asia

With more and more enterprises wanting to mobilize their workforce and freeing their information systems from the constraints of wired networks, there has been a dramatic increase in the research activities in Asian countries. These research activities are on every topic in wireless Internet communication and networking that spans wireless wide area network (3G and beyond-3G), wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11x), wireless metropolitan area network (IEEE 802.16), wireless personal area network (UWB, Bluetooth), software-defined radio/cognitive radio, and wireless sensor networks. Concurrent rapid advances on all these fronts have created new challenges and opportunities in the area of network management. Integration of WLAN with evolving mobile cellular and fixed network technology infrastructures, limited battery life of computing nodes, quality of service in heterogeneous wireless networks, anywhere/ anytime access to web and company data, roaming/mobility across different types of wireless networks, all lie at the heart of many challenges in the management of the wireless and mobile networks. This special issue presents a few contributions in some of the these topics, particularly in the following: quality of service management for UMTS; traffic management for next-generation cellular networks; mobility management for next-generation IP networks; quality of service management for WLAN; and resource management for mobile ad hoc networks. Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) is one of the major new third-generation mobile communications systems which has been defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). UMTS provides increased capacity and data capability, which enables the delivery of not only voice but also multimedia content. It uses the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA), a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) as the radio access scheme, and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) for multiplexing the uplink and downlink communications. In UTRA-FDD-WCDMA there are three types of downlink transport channels for transmitting bursty data: common, dedicated and shared channels. By definition, the Downlink Shared Channel (DSCH) capacity can be shared among several users on a frameby-frame basis. The first article, by Kuri and Karthik, deals with the problem of scheduling a set of streaming connections over k frames of the DSCH in UMTS networks using the framework of optimization theory. They introduce a discrepancy criterion as the objective function to capture the inherent trade-off between aggregate throughput and fairness. They provide a simple low-complexity heuristic called ITEM, and establish that ITEM is a promising algorithm for scheduling streaming connections because: (i) it is provably optimal in certain cases; (ii) its performance in terms of running time is far superior to that of Exhaustive Search; (iii) it can aid in connection admission control (CAC); and (iv) it is superior to other general scheduling algorithms in terms of both fairness and aggregate throughput. Fourth-generation (4G) cellular networks aim at supporting various multimedia services with high data rate. To support high data rate, spectral efficiency should be enhanced more than that of 3G cellular systems by overcoming time and frequency selective fading. Recently, a mobile system based on IP and OFDM has been intensively considered as the next-generation standard by B3G (Beyond 3G) or 4G committees such as IEEE 802.16e and IEEE 802.20. A group of users enjoying multimedia services could move around in 4G cellular networks, causing the cells through which these user flows pass to become hotspots for a duration varying from a few seconds to a few minutes according to the speed of the users. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NETWORK MANAGEMENT Int. J. Network Mgmt 2007; 17: 103–105 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/nem.637