The widespread availability of mobile portable devices enriched with a variety of sensing capabilities, coupled with the impelling need of communication anytime and anywhere, has rapidly raised the interest towards new approaches to communications between users. Opportunistic networks are an instance of the delay tolerant paradigm applied to networks made up of users' portable devices (such as smartphones and tablets). As such, they are able to cope with challenged network conditions that are often present in real life, such as high node mobility, variable connectivity, and disconnections, which would impair communications in traditional Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In this scenario, user mobility becomes one of the main drivers to enable message delivery. In fact, according to the store-carry-and-forward paradigm, user devices store messages and carry them around while they move in the network, exchanging them upon encounter with other nodes, and eventually delivering them to their destination or to interested users. This new communication paradigm enables legacy applications in challenged scenarios, as well as it paves the way to innovative solutions. While opportunistic networks initially received attention to support communication where an infrastructure is not available (for disaster recovery or in rural areas), nowadays a number of applications can be envisaged ranging from content sharing, through mobile social networking, to participatory and urban sensing. All these applications rely on data forwarding amongst devices. As a consequence, two aspects become relevant, that is, the need for mechanisms guaranteeing trusted and secure communications while preserving users' privacy (in the absence of infrastructure and sometimes even end-to-end connectivity), and incentive mechanisms able to boost the participation in the network.

This Special Issue of Computer Communications seeks contributions pushing the state of the art in Opportunistic Networking. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

- Mobility measurements and models, mobility trace analysis
- Measurements, models, and analysis for user behaviors on mobile devices
- Unicast and multicast routing
- Transport, congestion control, and reliability issues
- Content dissemination, content caching, service composition, opportunistic computing
- Trust, security & privacy in opportunistic forwarding, incentive mechanisms, reputation systems, and key management
- Application support and middleware for opportunistic networks
- New applications and services relying on opportunistic networking
- Systems and experience for real-world deployments

Schedule
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Submission deadline: February 10, 2013
Author notification: May 24, 2013
Revised paper due: June 30, 2013
Final author notification: September 16, 2013
Publication: TBD

Guest Editors
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Chiara Boldrini, IIT-CNR, Italy
Kyunghan Lee, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea
Melek Onen, EURECOM, France
Joerg Ott, Aalto University, Finland
Elena Pagani, Universita' degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Instructions for submission
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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. In this case, 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 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: Opp-Net" when they reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process.

For further information, please contact the guest editors at
comcomsi_oppnet@iit.cnr.it