Editorial

Citation

Khalil, I. (2011), "Editorial", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpcc.2011.36107aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 7, Issue 1

This is the first issue of volume 7 of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications (IJPCC). It commences the seventh year of this journal which has proved to be an international premier channel, serving a large community of researchers and academics around the world, to report, discuss and exchange experimental or theoretical results, novel algorithms, design methodologies, work-in-progress, experiences, case studies, and trend-setting ideas in the emerging field of pervasive computing and communications.

Ubiquitous computing, calm computing, universal computing, invisible computing, context-aware computing, disappearing computing, proactive computing, ambient intelligence, everyday computing, sentient computing, autonomic computing and amorphous computing are but some of the names pervasive computing goes by as a vision of the future where computers and computing devices will be available naturally and unobtrusively every where, anytime, and by different means in our daily living, working, learning, business, infotainment environments.

In this issue, we have five outstanding papers. The first paper in this issue “Taking VANET to the clouds” by Stephan Olariu, Ismail Khalil and Mahmoud Abuelela puts forth a novel vision of vehicular clouds. In a vehicular cloud, the underutilized vehicular resources including computing power, internet connectivity, and storage can be shared between drivers or rented over the internet to various customers, very much as “standard” cloud resources are. The idea of a vehicular cloud is novel and so are the potential applications discussed in this paper and will open up a new research area.

The second paper “Advances in video networking: standards and applications” by Christos Grecos and Qi Wang is a survey paper on recent advances in video networking from an integrated perspective of both video signal processing and networking. Detailed technical descriptions and insightful analysis are presented for recent and emerging video coding standards, in particular the H.264 family. The applications of selected video coding standards in emerging wireless networks are then introduced with an emphasis on scalable video streaming in multi-homed mobile networks. Both research challenges and potential solutions are discussed along the description, and numerical results through simulations or experiments are provided to reveal the performances of selected coding standards and networking algorithms. This comprehensive overview and critiques on existing standards and application approaches offer a valuable reference for researchers and system developers in related research and industrial communities.

The third paper “An energy-efficient scheme for reporting events over WSNs” by Hajar Mousannif, Hassan Al Moatassime and Said Rakrak proposes a new, reactive, and energy-efficient scheme for reporting events in wireless sensor networks. In this scheme, nodes that detect a certain event will organize themselves into a cluster, elect a cluster head that will collect data from the cluster members, aggregate it and forward it to the mobile sink. This will decrease energy consumption inside the network and, thus, improve its lifetime.

The fourth paper “GeoPointer – approaching tangible augmentation of the real world” by Wolfgang Beer presents an architecture and prototypical implementation of a context-sensitive software system, which combines the tangible user interface approach with a mobile augmented reality application. GeoPointer presents a concept, which enables a smartphone to act as a tangible pointer, in order to receive information about an object in the real world. This pointing approach offers the user an intuitive way to specifically select objects of interest within a real world outdoor scenario as compared to the complex geometric transformations of the state-of-the-art visual augmented reality applications.

The final paper in this issue “SOLE: context-aware sharing of living experiences” by Jian Zhu, Mohammad Oliya, Hung Keng Pung and Wai Choong Wong introduces Sharing of Living Experience (SOLE) as a service, through which users can share their experience of daily activities such as shopping, entertainment, and traveling. The paper provides a detailed study of SOLE; namely, its design as well as its interaction with the middleware, information providers, and information consumers. The experiments show the ease of using SOLE and its acceptable performance in practice.

Starting from this issue, IJPCC will have a new editor and editorial team. We would like to thank Professor Laurence T. Yang, the former Editor of this journal, and his editorial team for the great job of setting up and running IJPCC for the last years. He managed to create a high-quality journal in the pervasive computing and communication area. The journal is in good shape and healthy. Also I would like to wish the new editorial team good luck in maintaining and increasing the quality of the journal.

Ismail Khalil