PREFACE
Special Issue on Wireless Networks
The primary purpose of the special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on wireless networks is to offer the readership a representative sample of results in the emerging field of wireless networks and communications.
In response to the Call of Papers, we received a large number of submissions from all over the world. The manuscripts underwent a very rigorous, peer review process. Each paper was reviewed by at least four referees. Unfortunately, due to page limitations, a large number of very good papers could not be accommodated in the special issue. A total of eight papers were selected. The result is truly remarkable: the special issue is an outstanding collection of papers on various aspects of wireless networks and communications.
The guest editor expresses his gratitude to Professor Sartaj Sahni for making this special issue possible. Special thanks go to all the authors for their submissions and to the anonymous referees who put in long hours to make sure that the papers were processed in a timely and professional way.
To give the reader a road map to the special issue it is, perhaps, appropriate to briefly describe each paper therein.
In the paper entitled ``Some Algorithms for Synchronizing Clocks of Base Transceiver Stations in a Cellular Network,'' Dornstetter, Krob, Morvan, and Viennot address the very important problem of clock synchronization that arises in the context of cellular networks. They offer several interesting and novel solutions to this classic problem.
In their paper ``The Sound of Silence: Guessing Games for Saving Energy in Mobile Environments,'' Dolev, Kovach, and Yukelson explore efficient discrete coding techniques that are motivated by the timeรenergy tradeoffs in message transmissions between mobile hosts and mobile support stations. The authors present three algorithms and provide a detailed discussion of their performance and energy efficiency.
In the paper entitled ``Algebraic Modelling of an Ad Hoc Network for Mobile Computing,'' Patsouris develops an algebraic model for an ad hoc network. The structure of the ad hoc network is based on a pathset algebra. A pathset is a set of all the paths in the network having specific sources and destinations. The applications, actions, and services in the network are organized as multiagent systems. The formal model of every multiagent system is based on a model algebra.
In the paper entitled ``A Distributed Dynamic Channel Allocation for Wireless Networks,'' Kahol, Churana, Gupta, and Srimani propose a channel allocation