Editorial

Citation

Khalil, I. (2012), "Editorial", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpcc.2012.36108aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 8, Issue 1

This is the first issue of Volume 8 of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communication, which commences the eighth year of this journal which has served a large community of researchers and academic around the world with the highest quality articles while reporting the state-of-the-art research results and scientific findings allowing researchers in this field to gain greater insight into pervasive computing and communication.

In this issue, we have two survey papers and three research papers. The first survey paper is about predicting user mobility, a timely and important topic in the next generation of location-based applications. The paper provides an overview of prediction techniques and reviews several location-prediction projects comparing the raw location data, feature extraction, choice of prediction algorithms and their results.

The paper concluded that incorporating temporal information enables location-predictions farther out into the future.

The second survey paper is about networks of smart metering systems reviews regulatory and technical constraints specific to smart grids and presents different options to realize smart-metering networks. The paper presented an overview of a diverse set of technologies which can and are used in the deployment of smart metering systems by providing a taxonomy of network technologies, discussing their suitability and weaknesses in the context of smart metering systems and giving a snapshot of the current standardization panorama, identifying key differences among various geographical regions.

The third paper addresses the issue of spatial messaging as a direct extension to text and other multimedia messaging services that became highly popular in pervasive computing and communications. The authors introduces an approach, called Air-Writing, to spatial messaging that fully preserves user privacy while offering global scalability, different client interface options, and flexibility in terms of application areas. Air-Writing, both as an architectural concept and as a specific implementation, are immediately applicable to practical, globally scalable, private group messaging systems.

The fourth paper discusses a multi-layered group model for a scalable P2P group to reduce the size of group information by ordering messages using both the linear time and physical time. The group of peers is required to cooperate with each other in distributed applications on P2P overlay networks.

The paper concluded through evaluation results, that the size of the group information can be reduced in the multi-layered group compared with the traditional flat group.

The last paper presents a scheduling method for continuous media data broadcasting as it is related to commercial content. The method, called Asynchronous Harmonic Broadcasting Considering Commercial, reduces waiting time effectively by dividing the data and producing an effective broadcasting schedule based on the playing time of commercial contents.

Ismail KhalilEditor-in-Chief