Call for Papers: 'Interdisciplinary and Cross-layer Design of Mobile Social Networks and Wireless Networks' Social Networks have attracted billions of active users under major online social network systems, such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, DouBan, etc. Nowadays these social networks are increasingly used on mobile devices; thus, rendering a new research field of mobile social networks. The marriage of current wired-network-based social networks with mobile wireless networks triggers exciting new research areas. For instance, knowing the network features such as throughput and delay can help mobile social networks select a contact (e.g. a job advice centre) to which the network route has the best performance.
This leads to the so-called wireless-aware social networks and the problem domain is within social networks. On the other hand, there is also social-aware or social-inspired wireless network research, where the knowledge of social network users is exploited for the benefit of wireless network design. Therefore, a cross-layer design that incorporates both the upper-layer mobile social networks and the lower-layer wireless networks is needed. And this comprises the thematic essence of this Special Issue. This cross-layer design method calls for a novel interdisciplinary research thinking that embraces not only these disciplines that are closely related to the field, such as computer science, social science and network/communication engineering, but also other subjects such as biology, physics, etc. The goal of this SI is to solicit the state-of-the-art approaches and technical solutions that embark on the above interdisciplinary and cross-layer design methodologies to design and