Mobile ad hoc and wireless networking technologies are growing at an ever-faster rate, and this is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. As opposed to cellular networks, mobile users can communicate and exchange information in areas without a pre-existing network infrastructure, or when the use of such infrastructure requires wireless extension in mobile ad hoc networks. Such networks would prove to be very useful in civilian and non-civilian environments.
This special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing contains a collection of highquality papers on mobile and wireless ad hoc networks. It is intended to present the state of the art and the current advances in mobile ad hoc networks.
In response to the Call For Papers for this special issue, we have received 78 high-quality submissions from all over the world, leading to a truly international competition. The large number of submissions confirms the growing importance of mobile and wireless ad hoc networks.
The selection process has also been highly competitive. Each paper went through a rigorous peer review by three to four referees. Based on the referee reports, the Guest Editor ranked the manuscripts for their original contribution and also carefully considered the suitability of the topics for the special issue. Thus, only 40 submissions were selected and they went through another round of revisions. In the second round, only nine manuscripts were recommended for publication in this issue.
Special thanks are due to all authors for their submissions and the reviewers for their hard work and timely report, which made this issue truly special.
The paper by L. Bo and J.J. Garcia, focuses on the channel access scheduling algorithm specification and performance evaluation. They propose three types of collision free channel access protocol for ad hoc networks, and evaluate the performance of their schemes using an extensive simulation set of experiments.