CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications NETWORKING AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES OF PERSONAL MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in personal mobile communications systems and services, fueled by availability and exploitation of wireless spectrum, and the development of low-cost, low-power communications devices. Various types of such systems and services have been referred to as Personal Communications Networks (PCN), Personal Communications Services (PCS), Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services (UMTS), Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT), etc. The development and deployment of these personal mobile communications systems raise significant technical issues at all protocol layers on these systems. There has been a tremendous amount of research and engineering work at the low-level protocols, aimed at meeting the challenges posed by the fundamental characteristics of personal mobile communications, namely user mobility, and the physical and link behavior and capacity of the wireless medium. However, these fundamental characteristics have significant impacts on the network and higher protocol layers. In particular, several challenges are raised for the wired infrastructure required to support personal mobile communications, in areas such as signaling, mobility and profile management, network databases, service software and architecture, teletraffic and performance, and network resource management, internetworking between wireless and wired networks, to name a few. The aim of this issue of J-SAC is to focus attention on the networking and performance issues posed by personal mobile communications at the network and higher protocol layers of the communications networks, and to also highlight solution approaches for the potential issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following: + Mobility management protocols and performance + Signaling network architectures, protocols, traffic and performance + Models of user mobility and characterization of mobility patterns + Tracking of user locations and performance tradeoffs + Network architectures for terminal, personal and service mobility + Network database algorithm, design, placement, performance, and reliability + Security and authentication protocols and their impacts on the wired infrastructure + Internetworking of wireless and wired Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN) + Internetworking of wireless and ATM networks + Interworking of private (including radio LANs) and public wireless networks + Wired infrastructure and protocols to support wireless multimedia + Overload control design and performance of wireless and wired infrastructure for mobile communications + Architectures, protocols and network support for personal mobile information services + Personal mobile services and applications, including mobile computing + Billing and Operations Systems support Original, unpublished research articles will be considered. All articles will be evaluated according to a two-stage process as follows. Prospective authors are first invited to submit a summary of their paper to one of the Guest Editors listed below by April 1, 1996. Commitment notification is anticipated for June 1, 1996. If a summary is accepted, complete manuscript will be requested for submission by August 15, 1996 for full review. The anticipated publication date for this issue will be 2nd Quarter 1997. Hamid Ahmadi Ravi Jain IBM T J Watson Res Ctr Bellcore 30 Saw Mill Drive 445 South Street Hawthorne, NY 10532 Morristown, NJ 07960-6438 Tel: +1 914 784 7219 Tel: +1 201 829 4756 Fax: +1 914 784 7068 Fax: +1 201 829 5888 hamid@watson.ibm.com rjain@thumper.bellcore.com Paul J. Kuehn Kin K. Leung IND, Univ of Stuttgart AT&T Bell Laboratories Seidenstrasse 36 101 Crawfords Corner Road 70174 Stuttgart, Germany Holmdel, NJ 07733 Tel: +49 711 121 2479 Tel: +1 908 949 2061 Fax: +49 711 121 2477 Fax: +1 908 949 1720 kuehn@ind.uni-stuttgart.de kin.k.leung@att.com Victor O.K. Li Dept of Electrical Engineering Univ of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-2565 Tel: +1 213 740 4665 Fax: +1 213 740 8729 vli@irving.usc.edu