Broadband Wireless

This special issue of the Journal of High Speed Networks deals with an issue of significant current interest – Broadband Wireless. A very significant research effort is underway, both in the academia and industry, to increase the bandwidth available over wireless networks. Many of the application scenarios that will drive the ‘wireless Internet’ are predicated upon the availability of higher bandwidth. In popular discussions, broadband wireless is often equated with 3G/4G type solutions that provide high bandwidth wide area connectivity via cellular telephony networks. The articles in this issue however go beyond such narrow constructions of the term, and examine various research issues related to broadband wireless technology. We present perspectives from both academic researchers (from UIUC and Georgia Tech) and industrial researchers (from Nokia and IBM). The paper by Eklund et al. discusses how millimeter wave point-to-multipoint systems can be used to provide high bandwidth wireless links that are optimized for IP traffic to homes/offices. They discuss issues related to standardization, regulation, system design, and service requirements. The paper by Gao et al. addresses the issues related to improving the performance of fair queuing techniques for wireless channels by using adaptive FEC and ARQ methods. Broadband access brings with it issues relating to guarantying Quality of Service to applications. This issue is addressed in the paper by Toh and Tsai, who examine how QoS mechanisms in wireless ATM systems differ from their wired counterparts. In terms of short range personal area networks, the use of RF has yielded significantly higher speeds than Infrared systems. Bluetooth is one of the leading standards in this area, and the paper by Kumar et al. examines algorithms for scheduling and queuing issues in Bluetooth Systems. In summary, the four articles that form this issue bring out interesting work in some important and hard problems related to broadband access in its various forms. While Bluetooth technology is only one of the issues discussed in this issue, we’d like to devote some of the editorial to give you more information about it, given its importance and timeliness. We were helped in writing this by Filip Perich and Jeffrey Undercoffer of the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and by Chatschik Bisdikian of the IBM T.J. Watson Labs.