Special Issue on: "Scalable Wireless Networks"

Guest Editors: Marcello Caleffi and Luigi Paura, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

With the explosive proliferation of mobile communication and wireless computing devices, the scalability property is becoming an increasingly popular and important issue in wireless communication research, as it has been recognised as one of the key features for supporting pervasive networking scenarios.

The scalability concept involves several dimensions, such as the node number, the data load, the user/application number, etc, and it is the basis on which to break up the cellular concept, enriching it by multi-hop communications. Nevertheless, many aspects of scalable wireless communications are still open problems and, moreover, some of the scalable solutions for wireless networks proposed so far are based on ideal assumptions not always justified in the practical applications.

The aim of this special issue is to bring together the state-of-the-art research contributions that address the major opportunities and challenges of scalable wireless communication and networking, with emphasis on the design, analysis and evaluation of new techniques and novel application scenarios.