INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Int. J. Commun. Syst.,11, 1 (1998)

GUEST EDITORIAL ON PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONSYi-Bing Lin*

Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

Personal communications systems (PCSs) providecommunication services anywhere, anytime, withanybody and in any form. To implement personalcommunications concepts, extremely sophisticatedsystems which integrate many diverse technologiesare required. This issue contains an extra sectionfocussing on various aspects of PCSs.

In the first article, Charlies Perkins provides anoverview of Mobile IP. Mobile IP has been designedwithin the IETF to support mobility managementfor mobile computers so that they can connect tothe Internet and maintain communications as theymove from place to place. This article describesthree major component protocols of Mobile IP(Agent Advertisement, Registration and Tunnelling)and route optimization procedures, and a futureresearch road-map for Mobile IP is outlined.

In the second article, Kazem Sohraby investigatestraffic behaviour in circular and linear cellulararrays. A model for fixed velocity mobiles is intro-duced. It is shown that the cellular network trafficis independent of the number of cells in the circulararray case and that, compared with non-mobility inboth linear and circular arrays, mobility factors suchas cell size, call holding time and velocity ofmobiles have considerable impact on probabilitiesof call blocking.

In the third article, Paramvir Bahl, Imrich Chlam-tac and Andras Farago address the issues that arisefrom supporting integrated multirate multimediatraffic in a poor-bandwidth wireless environment. Anovel bandwidth allocation strategy is introducedand discussed that can partition the available band-width amongst the different traffic classes in a man-ner that ensures guaranteed quality of service fordigital video while minimizing the maximum block-ing probability for voice and data connections. Thisalgorithm, which is built on non-trivial mathematical

*Correspondence to: Y.-B. Lin, Department of Computer Scienceand Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University,Hsinchu, Taiwan. Email: linyKcsie.nctu.edu.twContract grant sponsor: Microelectronics and Information SystemsResearch CenterContract grant sponsor: National Chiao Tung UniversityContract grant sponsor: National Science Council, ROC;contract grant number: NSC86–2213-E-009–072

CCC 1074–5351/98/010001–1$17.50 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

results, is robust, easy to implement and has ageometric rate of convergence which ensures thatthe partitioning points are found quickly. Theseproperties make it well suited for practicalimplementation, even for cases in which changes inthe aggregate traffic loads cause bandwidth allo-cations to be recomputed frequently.

acknowledgement

We would like to thank the Managing Editor JohnFox for his assistance in editing this special issue.

Author’s biography:

Yi-Bing Lin received his BSEE degree from NationalCheng Kung University in 1983 and his PhD degree incomputer science from the University of Washington in1990. From 1990 to 1995 he was with the AppliedResearch Area at Bell Communications Research(Bellcore), Morristown, NJ. In 1995 he was appointedProfessor at the Department of Computer Science andInformation Engineering (CSIE), National Chiao TungUniversity (NCTU). In 1996 he was appointed DeputyDirector of the Microelectronics and Information SystemsResearch Center, NCTU and in 1997 he became the Chairof CSIE/NCTU. His current research interests include thedesign and analysis of personal communications servicesnetworks, mobile computing, distributed simulation andperformance modelling.