Advances in Mobile Communications and Computing

Advances in technology have enabled the combinations of mobile and ubiquitous computing to be increasingly present in our daily life. For example, progress in low power wireless communications along with silicon integration of various functionalities, such as sensing, communications, intelligence and actuations are emerging as a critically important disruptive computer class based on a new platform, networking structure and interface that enable novel, low cost, high volume applications such as nuclear, biological and chemical attack detection and protection, home automation, battlefield surveillance and environmental monitoring. To fulfill the potential for new services, applications and businesses offered by new computing and communication capabilities, several complex research issues need to be further studied and resolved. This special issue highlights advances in various aspects of mobile communications and computing, and is organized mainly from the papers of the The 22nd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications AINA 2008, held in GinoWan, Okinawa, Japan, March 25–28, 2008. The conference received 469 submissions and every paper was reviewed carefully by 3 reviewers. Based on their quality and significance 146 papers were accepted in AINA 2008. We received 19 papers for this special issue. After two more rounds of review, we accepted 6 papers based on their quality and suitability to the special issue as well as the journal. Security is the major requirement of mobile and e-commerce systems. These systems and environments need many distributed access points, for the creation and management of secure identities and for the secure recognition of users. Traditionally, these access points can be made possible by a software system with a main central server. In the first paper, Conti et al. propose the study and implementation of a multimodal technique, based on biometric information, for identity management and personal ubiquitous authentication. In the second paper, Santangelo et al. describe a framework aimed at streamlining the design process of multi-channel, multimodal interfaces enabling full reuse of software components in mobile systems. This framework is called the eXtensible Presentation architecture and Language (XPL), a presentation language based on design pattern paradigm that keeps separated the presentation layer from the underlying