Special Issue on Research Advances and Standardization Activities in WLANs

Computer Communications http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-communications/call-for-papers/res...

Scope A new generation of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is going to make its appearance in the upcoming years, with the IEEE 802.11aa (Robust Audio Video Transport Streaming), IEEE 802.11ac (Very-high throughput < 6GHz), IEEE 802.11af (TV White Spaces) and IEEE 802.11ad (Very-high throughput ~60 GHz), as examples of the most expected ones. Nevertheless, all next-generation standards will consider some of the most significant advances on the wireless communication and networking area in the last decade, developed by a highly active community, in both academia and industry.

This special issue requests papers that advance the state-of-the-art of the recent and on-going IEEE 802.11 standards (i.e., IEEE 802.11p, IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.11aa, IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ad, IEEE 802.11ae, IEEE 802.11ah, IEEE 802.11af, IEEE 802.11ai, etc.), as well as present mechanisms and solutions, from MAC or above layers, that could be readily transferred to the not-yet finished standards or their future amendments. Please, note that pure PHY-layer papers are outside the scope of this Special Issue, although cross-layer approaches are welcome.

In addition, there is special interest in those papers that provide new theoretical and/or experimental insights on the performance of the new and on-going IEEE 802.11 standards in real application scenarios, as well as propose optimal parameter configurations to make them work as much efficiently as possible. Papers proposing, evaluating and comparing disruptive approaches to the path followed by the IEEE 802.11 standards are also very much appreciated.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Coexistence mechanisms between IEEE 802.11 and other wireless networks in unlicensed bands. - Inter-Access point cooperative mechanisms. - Service discovery in WLANs. - Dynamic channel access mechanisms, including cognitive radio techniques and channel bonding strategies. - Link-layer mechanisms to efficiently operate in the new spectrum bands (below 1 GHz, TV White Spaces, 60 GHz band, etc.). - Multiple packet transmission and reception techniques. - Packet aggregation mechanisms. - Energy efficient link-layer protocols for multi-service WLANs with heterogeneous QoS requirements. - Cross-layer Network/MAC techniques for multi-hop networking and cooperative relays. - Advanced relaying strategies for MIMO multicell systems. - Mobility support, vehicular networks and networks of mobile objects. - Multimedia home networking, HDTV and video distribution. - Integration of home and city Smart Grids (M2M communications) in WLANs.

Tentative Schedule Submission deadline: September 15, 2012 Author notification: December 15, 2012 Revised paper due: January 31, 2013 Final author notification: March 15, 2013 Expected publication: 2nd quarter 2013

Guest-editors Boris Bellalta (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Alexey Vinel (Tampere University of Technology, Finland) Periklis Chatzimisios (Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki, Greece) Raffaele Bruno (IIT/CNR, Italy) Chonggang Wang (InterDigital, USA)

Instructions for submission: Manuscripts must not have been previously published nor currently under review by other journals or conferences. If the paper was published in a conference, the submitted manuscript should be a substantial extension of the conference paper. Authors are also required to submit their published conference articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version. Papers must be submitted through the Computer Communications website at http://ees.elsevier.com/comcom, where guidelines for the manuscript preparation can also be found. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration by the Special Issue, the authors should select "Special Issue: WLANs" when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process.