Mobile and Wireless Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless and mobile computing technologies have led to a new paradigm of computing by providing a lot of services and functionalities.Wireless technologies allow a wide spectrum of devices including laptops, PDA, intellectual sensors, and cellular phones to exchange and process information.To fulfill the potential for new services, applications and businesses offered by new computing and communication capabilities, several complex research issues need to be further studied and resolved.For example, in order to guarantee the performance requirements from applications in heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks (MWNets), we need to develop new techniques for communication, QoS support, middleware, data management, etc.Also, information exchange among unconstrained entities (e.g.people, server, etc) need security mechanisms to guarantee data confidentiality and integrity and protect services from unauthorized use.This special issue is to address some of these challenges in MWNets.In response to the call for papers, we received regular papers as well as extended versions of the outstanding papers presented at the third International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS-2009) and its workshops.All these submitted papers have gone through a strict review process and among them, six high-quality papers were selected for the publication.This special issue starts with the paper entitled "Global Consistency Management Methods Based on Escrow Approaches in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks".The authors assume special types of applications in which the instances of each data item can be partitioned and propose two consistency management protocols which are combinations of an escrow method and the authors' previously proposed protocols.The authors also report simulation results to investigate the characteristics of these protocols in a mobile ad hoc network.From the simulation results, it is confirmed that the protocols proposed drastically improve data availability and reduce the traffic for data operations while maintaining the global consistency in the entire network.The second paper entitled "Using Mobile Devices to Support Online Collaborative Learning", attempts to bridge relevant aspects of mobile technologies in support for collaborative learning and provides a tighter view by means of a multidimensional approach from pedagogical, technological, and evaluation perspectives.Specifically, the authors first analyze the pedagogical perspective in depth, and then study how mobile technologies intersect with the different pedagogical approaches considered.Finally,