CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue in Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems Journal
Mobile Edge Computing: Opportunities, Solutions, and Challenges

Submission Deadline: 30th December, 2015

Future Generation Computer Systems invites manuscript submissions in the area of "Mobile Edge Computing: Opportunities, Solutions, and Challenges"

AIM and SCOPE:

The cloud computing facilitates users with several opportunities by providing wide range of services and virtually unlimited available resources. The large pool of resources and services has enabled the emergence of several new applications, such as virtual reality, smart grids, and smart building control. However, the euphoria transforms into a problem for delay-sensitive applications, which need to meet the delay requirements. The problem becomes clearer and more intense as several smart devices and objects are getting involved in human’s life as in case of smart cities or Internet of Things. Current cloud computing paradigm is unable to meet the requirements of low latency, location awareness, and mobility support. To address the problem, researchers have coined a term of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) that was introduced to bring the cloud services and resources closer to the user proximity by leveraging the available resources in the edge networks.
MEC aims to enable the billions of connected mobile devices to execute the real-time compute-intensive applications directly at the network edge. The distinguishing features of MEC are its closeness to end-users, mobility support, and dense geographical deployment of the MEC servers. Despite the several advantages, realizing the vision of MEC is challenging task because of the administrative policies and security concerns. There is a need to investigate the key requirements and potential opportunities for enabling the vision of MEC. In this special issue, we are seeking new and unpublished work in the domain of MEC. More specifically, this special issue will focus on recent developments in MECs.

The list of topics includes, but is not limited to:

· Identification of incentives for MEC service providers
· MEC architecture: peculiar features and evolution
· User transparent application execution frameworks for MEC
· Real-time communication interfaces and protocols for enabling the communication between MEC client and MEC server, between MEC servers, between MEC server and the cloud server
· Smart MEC scheduler to improve resource scheduling that enhances the reliability and scalability
· Resource monitoring mechanism and utilization measuring mechanism
· MEC resources allocation and management
· Real-time load prediction model to optimize the user satisfaction
· MEC functionalities virtualization
· Data storage, processing, and management at MEC platform
· Simulation models for MEC
· Performance evaluation of MEC simulators and platforms
· Deployment strategies of MEC Servers
· Admission control for MEC
· Pricing and billing models for MEC
· Lightweight authentication mechanisms that are also feasible to run on the resource constrained devices such as smart sensors
· Open issues, challenges and future perspective for MEC


Important Dates:

Manuscript Due: 30th December 2015
Acceptance notification: 30th April 2016
Revised paper due: 30th June 2016
Final manuscript due: 30 August 2016
Expected Publication of the Special Issue: 25 Dec 2016


Submission Guidelines:

All submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at http://ees.elsevier.com/fgcs/. Authors should select “SI:MECS”, from the “Choose Article Type” pull-down menu during the submission process. All contributions must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. A submission based on one or more papers that appeared elsewhere has to comprise major value-added extensions over what appeared previously (at least 30% new material). Authors are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.


Guest Editors of the Special Issue:

Ejaz Ahmed, Lead Guest Editor
University of Malaya,
Malaysia
imejaz@gmail.com

Mubashir Husain Rehmani
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology,
Pakistan
mshrehmani@gmail.com