What will it take to enmesh the explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the potential for Personal Communication Services (PCS) to engender the next generation of mobile user applications?

In the past, when voice applications were predominant, the specific characteristics of voice were closely studied and exploited in the design of low-cost portable radios. Such designs may not be adequate for supporting multimedia exchanges between a mobile population of users that have a diverse collection of bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) needs. In this new environment, users' needs will vary dynamically and may require the rapid reallocation of radio resources. Furthermore, network performance parameters such as delay are influenced by radio receiver parameters such as Bit Error Rate (BER) and Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR); but there is a need to explicitly relate such QoS metrics to the allocation of radio resources. Topics of interest for this special issue will include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Impact of physical layer impairments on higher layers
• Impact of Forward Error Control (FEC), Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), power control, and interleaving on multi-media applications
• Coding strategies to match multi-media applications to the wireless channel, including joint source and channel coding
• Radio designs for bursty traffic from mobile users
• Dynamically reconfigurable multi-mode, multi-format radio architectures
• QoS support through radio reconfiguration
• Radio designs for context awareness and impairment concealment
• Energy management strategies
• Software interfaces for control of radio architectures
• High-speed radios for Wireless ATM

Original, unpublished contributed and invited articles will be considered for the issue. Authors are asked to submit a summary to Ramesh Rao according to the following timetable. Reviewers will provide feedback for the authors and complete manuscripts will be fully reviewed prior to publication.

Summary Due:	September 1, 1997
Feeback Due:	October 15, 1997
Manuscript Due:	December 1, 1997
Acceptance Notification:	March 1, 1998
Final Manuscript Due:	May 1, 1998
Publication Date:	4th Quarter 1998

Ramesh R. Rao (Primary Contact) Ctr for Wireless Communications Dept of Elect and Comp Eng 0407 Univ of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, USA rrao@ucsd.edu

Ender Ayanoglu Bell Labs, Lucent 101 Crawfords Corner Rd Rm 4F507 Holmdel, NJ 07733, USA ender@bell-labs.com

Victor Bahl Video Codecs & Mobile Computing Labs Digital Equipment Corp 110 Spitbrook Rd ZK1-1/E37 Nashua, NH 03062, USA bahl@crl.dec.com

Roger S. Cheng Dept of Electrical & Electronic Eng of Science & Technology Clear Water Bay, Kowloon Hong Kong eecheng@ee.ust.hk

Michele Zorzi Dipartmento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 I-20133 Milano, Italy zorzi@elet.polimi.it