GUEST EDITORIAL
MOBILE INTERNET
ZHANG Ping
A
s most terminals sold today offer wireless Internet connectivity as a primary feature for personal communication requirements, the “Mobile Internet” is rapidly flourishing in the information society. And, yet, the mobile Internet is still young and growing at a rapid pace. More than ever, engineers and theoreticians are challenged to enable the continued safe growth of the mobile Internet. We face a continuing increase of physical diversity, with WiFi competing with LTE and 3G networks to satisfy the nearly insatiable demands for consuming mobile content. As of last year, WiFi has become the major wireless carrier and new IEEE specifications will serve to further accelerate this trend. To increase frequency re-use and wireless network capacity, cell sizes must continue to decrease, as enabled and accelerated by the deployment of new technologies such as IEEE 802.11ac and so-called “small cells”. Nowhere is the demand for growth more evident than in China, which long ago has become the nation with the greatest number of wireless users, and which has devoted huge emphasis on manufacturing equipment for wireless communications as well as encouraging many related research efforts. In this Feature Topic on Mobile Internet, we bring together technical works which investigate viable approaches to the solution of diverse highlighted research problems and challenges. The selected papers represent the following areas: new service architecture of mobile Internet, mobile Internet evolutionary trends, wireless channel characterization and modeling, and mobile proximity interaction. We also hope to excite future research explorations in this promising field. In the first paper “Mobile Social Networking Aided Content Dissemination in Heterogeneous Networks”, the authors present the principles of Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) aided content dissemination, which is a potential extension
China Communications June 2013
Charles E. Perkins
of conventional cellular wireless networks in order to satisfy the increasing data traffic. MSN users rely on self-organisation and ad hoc networking for disseminating the desired content across the community. Moreover, the authors propose an application of MSN aided content dissemination in cellular communications and demonstrate that network operators may benefit from employing the proposed scheme in densely populated areas, resulting in a reduced dissemination delay even with reduced access network investments. In “Technology Trends and Architecture Research for Future Mobile Internet”, some of the main challenges in the mobile Internet related to bandwidth, address space, security, mobility and energy are analysed. Related technology trends and the progress of architecture research aimed towards the future mobile Internet are depicted. The article’s conclusion illustrates that no single technology can solve all of the problems of the mobile Internet; thus future research should focus more attention on how to make architectures and technologies work together more effectively. In the paper “Average Channel Capacity of Composite κ-μ/Gamma Fading Channels”, the authors present the new analytical expression for the instantaneous power Probability Density Function (PDF) of receiver signals over composite κ-μ/Gamma fading channels. Moreover, the exact expression of channel capacity is derived in the form of infinite series, while an accurately approximating expression is obtained in closed-form. To show the implications of the model parameters on capacity, the authors give the expression in the case of high-SNR regime. Notably, the relationship of the presented results with previously reported results on generalized-K and K fading channels is also established. In “Offloading Mobile Data from Cellular Networks
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GUEST EDITORIAL
Through Peer-to-Peer WiFi Communication: A Subscribeand-Send Architecture”, the challenge on wireless network capacity for increasing traffic demand is addressed again. Since delay tolerant networking and opportunistic forwarding among terminals through peer-to-peer WiFi communications could play a more and more important role in offloading the cellular network infrastructure bandwidth, a Subscribe-and-Send architecture and an opportunistic forwarding protocol, HPRO, for Subscribe-and-Send are proposed. The forwarding performance and the traffic offloading performance of Subscribe-and-Send and HPRO are evaluated so that one may assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution offloading the cellular network data traffic. In “CACTSE: Cloudlet Aided Cooperative Terminals Service Environment for Mobile Proximity Content Delivery”, a new perspective on edge content delivery service for mobile Internet is depicted, which is based on the cooperation of terminals. A mobile cloud architecture named CACTSE is proposed as an edge network service environment. The Service Manager, a cloudlet like module, is introduced into the local service domain in order to manage the in-domain terminals and help coordinate the content delivery requests for better bandwidth efficiency as well as user experience. The reference model is presented in this article with architecture and mechanism design. Moreover, the research progress and potential technology trends of CACTSE are analysed based on related R&D directions. We express our thanks to the authors who submitted papers and to the reviewers for their diligent and timely efforts and insightful comments on the quality and appropriateness of the submitted papers. It has been a pleasure to put together this issue on this very timely topic and we hope you enjoy it.
Member of next-generation broadband wireless communication
Biographies
and been awarded dozens of patents. Recently he has been nomi-
ZHANG Ping, received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
served on various committees for the National Research Council, as
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China in
well as numerous technical assessment boards for Army Research Lab
1990. He is a Professor at the School of Information and Communica-
and the Swiss MICS program. He has also served as Associate Editor
tion Engineering of BUPT. He is an Executive Associate Editor-in-Chief
for Mobile Communications and Computing Review, the official pub-
on information sciences of Chinese Science Bulletin, Reviewer and
lication of ACM SIGMOBILE, and has served on the editorial staff for
TPC Member of many magazines, journals and conferences. He is a
IEEE Internet Computing magazine.
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network in National Science and Technology Major Project, a Member of the 5th Advisory Committee of National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chief Scientist of “973” National Basic Research Program of China, a Member of the 11th Beijing Municipal Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and the owner of the Special Government Allowance of State Council of China. He received the Second Award for National Science and Technology Advance Prize twice, the Second Award for National Science and Technology Invention Prize once, the Provincial Science and Technology Awards many times, and the Title of Outstanding Scientific and Technological Workers in 2010. His research interests include broadband wireless communication, new technologies on cognitive wireless networks, TD-LTE, MIMO, OFDM etc. Email:
[email protected] Charles E. Perkins, a Senior Principal Engineer at Futurewei, investigating mobile wireless networking and dynamic configuration protocols, in particular LTE, SDN, and contributes to IEEE, IETF, and ONF. He is serving as Document Editor for the 802.21 group of the IEEE, and Author or Co-Author of IETF standards-track documents in numerous IETF working groups both past and present. He is an Editor for several journals in areas related to wireless networking. He has continued strong involvement with performance issues related to Internet access for billions of portable wireless devices as well as activities for ad hoc networking and scalability. Charles has authored and edited books on mobile IP and ad hoc networking, and has published a number of papers and award winning articles in areas of mobile networking, ad-hoc networking, route optimization for mobile networking, resource discovery, and automatic configuration for mobile computers. Charles was also one of the creators of MobiHoc, the premier conference series that has provided the forum for many of the most important publications in the field of ad hoc networking; he remains on the steering committee for that conference. He has served as General Chair and Program Committee Chair for MobiHoc, MASS 2006, ICWUS 2010, and other conferences and workshops. Charles has served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) of the IETF and, at last count, has authored or co-authored more than 25 RFCs. He has made numerous inventions nated for Inventor of the Year by the European Patent Office. He has
China Communications June 2013
