>>> EURASIP JWCN Special Issue on Reconfigurable Radio for Future Generation Wireless Systems Future generation wireless systems aim to support a wide variety of services over a wide variety of networks in a way transparent to the user. To deliver the optimal quality-of-service (QoS) for many different applications over many different communication environments, flexibility and adaptivity are key ingredients of these future generation wireless systems. Rather than relying on the traditional horizontal communication model consisting of a single wireless access system, these future 4G systems will employ a vertical communication model, which integrates different existing and evolving wireless access systems on a common IP-based platform, to complement each other for different service requirements and radio environments. To enable seamless and transparent interworking between these different wireless access systems, or communication modes, through horizontal (intrasystem) and vertical (intersystem) handovers, multimode terminals that support different existing and newly emerging air interfaces are needed. As a deep penetration of the multimode terminal is aimed at in the telecommunication market, new challenges appear in terms of minimizing the terminal cost, size, and power consumption while, at the same time, maximizing its flexibility with respect to communication standards as well as its adaptivity with respect to varying user requirements and changing communication conditions. The conventional approach to the design of a multimode terminal is the provision of a custom baseband processor for every communication mode. However, with the growing number of standards and communication modes, this approach is becoming increasingly infeasible and economically unacceptable. A more efficient approach towards this design is to adopt a reconfigurable (as opposed to fixed) radio concept, such that the terminal can adapt to the best-suited communication mode under the control of a QoS manager. A high degree of flexibility is not only required for the digital baseband processing but also for the analog radio frequency (RF) front-end, which should accept a large range of carrier frequencies, possess a flexible bandwidth, and deal with a wide variety of operational conditions. Likewise, the same high degree of flexibility is not only called for at the physical layer but also at the medium access control (MAC) (and possibly higher) layer(s), to be compatible with the protocols of different standards. This special issue aims to cover the present research on reconfigurable radio for future generation wireless systems. Prospective papers should present original and innovative contributions to the wireless communications community. Fundamental research results as well as practical implementations and demonstrators are solicited for. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): o Flexible digital baseband signal processing o Adaptive modulation and coding o Flexible multiple access schemes o Flexible MIMO signalling o Channel quality information prediction o Adaptive transmission schemes o Reconfigurable transmission techniques o Reconfigurable receiver algorithms o Reconfigurable detection and equalization o Reconfigurable channel estimation o Reconfigurable synchronization o Software defined radio o Flexible analog RF front-ends o Multifrequency RF front-ends o Multiband RF front-ends o Flexible MAC protocols o QoS management o Reconfiguration algorithms o Handover and QoS negotiation o Link adaptation o Dynamic resource allocation o Dynamic frequency allocation o Channel adaptive networking and routing Authors should follow the EURASIP JWCN manuscript format described at the journal site http://wcn.hindawi.com/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the EURASIP JWCN's manuscript tracking system at http://www.mstracking.com/wcn/, according to the following timetable. Manuscript Due October 1, 2004 Acceptance Notification January 31, 2005 Final Manuscript Due March 31, 2005 Publication Date 2nd Quarter, 2005 Guest Editors: Frederik Petrˆ, Interuniversity Micro Electronics Center (IMEC), Wireless Research, Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium; frederik.petre@imec.be Ahmet Kondoz, Centre for Communication Systems Research (CCSR), University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, England; a.kondoz@surrey.ac.uk Stefan Kaiser, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation, 82234 Wessling, Germany; stefan.kaiser@dlr.de Refereeing: If you are willing to referee paper(s) for this special issue, please visit the following URL: http://www.mstracking.com/wcn/si/si.php?si=RR. All referees shall receive a complimentary copy of the special issue upon publication. <<< Please visit http://wcn.hindawi.com for more information about the journal. EURASIP JWCN publishes as many issues as required based on the flow of high-quality manuscripts and current scheduled special issues. To submit a proposal of a special issue, please contact the journal's editor-in-chief. In order not to receive any future "EURASIP JWCN" alert messages, please simply click on the following link: http://alert.hindawi.com/remove.asp?j=wcn&e=dolinsky@gsu.by >>>