Call for Papers

IEEE Communications Magazine

Context-Aware Networking and Communications

Context-aware communication and computing have attracted increasing attention since it allows automatic adaptation of devices, systems, and applications to the changing user’s context. The context is the information characterizing the situation of an entity and providing information about the present status of people, places, things and devices in the environment. An entity is a person, device, place, or object relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, such as location, time, activities, and services. Context awareness allows for customization or creation of the application to match the preferences of the individual user, based on current context such as enterprise environment or home network.

A first area of interest concerns the Person Context Awareness. The recent emergence of the so-called social networks, the widespread presence of smartphones equipped by heterogeneous sensors, such as GPS receivers, accelerometers, compasses, microphones and cameras, and the availability of geo-referenced information enable analysis of new context definitions that may concern individual, social, and urban scenarios. Indeed, recently, the available information may include mobility patterns of people and also physical activities (movements), physical status, and emotional conditions. This information is often acquired and shared, in real time, by users. Allowing the reliable extraction and sharing of that information is a fundamental research issue with important applications. It could improve the experience of individual, communities, organizations, and societies by adapting context to the environment (home, hospitals, campuses, offices, etc.).

Another area in this field deals with the Object Context Awareness. Context awareness may be implemented using quite different aspects under different environments, conditions, and layers, such as layered context-aware architecture for middleware, context awareness for connecting entities of network components, and infrastructure (Internet protocol, handoff management, sensing, network requirements, network controls and network implementation).

This feature topic’s scope will include both computing and communications networks, especially mobile computing networks. This topic will focus on more recent relevant topics, such as green context awareness (which would be supported by Technical Subcommittee on Green Communications and Computing [TSCGCC] of the IEEE Communications Society), context-aware security, new context-aware network architecture, and context-awareness for connecting entities (which would be supported by Technical Committee on Satellite and Space Communications [SSC] of the IEEE Communications Society), and context-aware social networks.

The papers in this feature topic will focus on state-of-the-art research and emerging industry technologies in Context-Aware Networking and Communications. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include, but are not limited to, the following:

· Context-aware protocols, algorithms, architecture

· Context-aware green communications and computing networking

· Context-aware modeling and analysis methods

· Context-aware security approaches

· Context-aware distributed systems

· Context-awareness in the Internet of Things

· Context-aware semantic networking, including semantic Web

· Context-aware data storage and cloud computing

· Context-aware recommender systems

· Context-awareness in smart spaces

· Context-awareness in wireless/wired networks

· Context-awareness in multimedia content distribution

· Adaptive and context-based multimodal interaction

· Context-aware communications services and applications

· Location-aware services and/or context-aware location tracking

· Context-aware messaging and/or addressing and/or routing

· Mobile phone sensing

· Personal awareness in smart environments

· Social context understanding and/or social interaction among peers

· Context-aware social networks

· Urban awareness for communications and networking

· Social agents and avatars

· Virtual humans for communications and networking

· Standardizations and regulations for context-aware information networking and communications

Prospective authors should follow the IEEE Communications Magazine manuscript format described in the Authors Guidelines (http://www.comsoc.org/commag/paper-submission-guidelines). All articles to be considered for publication must be submitted through the IEEE Manuscript Central (http://commag-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com, select "June 2014/Context-Aware Networking and Communications" from the drop-down menu), according to the following timetable:

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2013

Notification of Acceptance: February 1, 2014

Final Manuscript Due: April 1, 2014

Publication Date: June, 2014

Guest Editors

Jinsong Wu, Bell Laboratories, China, wujs@ieee.org

Igor Bisio, University of Genoa, Italy, igor.bisio@unige.it

Haibo Li, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, haiboli@kth.se

Ekram Hossain, University ofManitoba, Canada, ekram@EE.UManitoba.CA

Chris Gniady, University of Arizona, USA, gniady@cs.arizona.edu

Massimo Valla, Telecom Italia S.p.A., Italy, massimo.valla@telecomitalia.it

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