Wireless Machine-to-Machine Networks 2013

Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology allows direct communications between machine devices through wireless and/or wired systems without human intervention, which opens unique opportunities to businesses as well as consumers on cost reduction and services improvement. It holds huge potential for applications in a wide range of industries. It has been expected that there will be a huge increase in the number of machine devices enabled by wireless M2M technology and the amount of traffic generated by these devices in the next five years. Due to the large diversities of the M2M applications (e.g.) are likely to be applied jointly to effectively support M2M applications. However, the heterogeneous network technologies combined with the low-power machine devices and diverse QoS requirements of M2M applications present big challenges to the design and implementation of wireless M2M network protocols and algorithms. Built on the last year's special issue on wireless M2M technologies and applications, this special issue continues to serve as a platform to gather researchers and engineers from different relevant areas, such as wireless sensor networks, RFID, WPAN, cellular networks and smart grid, to present the latest research advances on wireless M2M networks. Thirty papers have been accepted in this special issue. These papers are mainly focused on the following four research areas to address the main research challenges faced by wireless M2M networks, which are usually characterized by a large amount of low-power M2M devices, heterogeneous networks with limited bandwidth, and many coexisting applications with diverse QoS requirements: (1) developing advanced scalable wireless communication technologies and network architectures to improve network capacity; (2) designing and analyzing scalable wireless channel access and resource and interference management mechanisms for M2M applications; (3) designing and analyzing secure energy and bandwidth efficient network protocols; (4) designing and analyzing smart, adaptive, and self-organizing protocols and algorithms for dynamic wireless M2M networks. In the paper entitled " A dual-cycle architecture in cognitive M2M wireless networks " by Y. Li et al. dual-cycle cognitive model (DCCM) applied develops large scale cognitive wireless networks, in which the structure and implementation of service-oriented radio architecture (SORA) are explored. Experiment results show that the proposed DCCM-based SORA is able to develop loose-coupled, reusable, and scalable heterogeneous wireless M2M networks. The paper entitled " A performance analysis framework for WiFi/WiMAX heterogeneous metropolitan networks based on cross-layer design " by M. H. Ochoa et al. propose a performance analysis framework (PAF) for heterogeneous wireless networks, which …