With mobile terminals becoming the primary Internet devices for most of the people in the world and smartphone users generating on average 10 times more traffic than other users, it is critical that Telco operators and ISPs adopt smarter traffic management and pricing strategies. Current forecasts expect mobile data traffic to grow by 300-500 times more over the next 10 years, whereas the capacity of cellular infrastructure only doubles every 2 years. By 2020, more than half of the revenue in the global broadband industry is likely to be from two business models: wholesale and “two-sided” fees for improved access capacity and quality. Those models require the enforcement of stringent policy control mechanisms for bandwidth management, QoS and service level agreements, according to subscriber policies with real-time perspective on usage, location, device and user type, radio access technology, network capacity and topology. In this area, several research challenges are still to be addressed:

• How can the network be made service-, state- and/or context-aware in order to apply specific policies to enhance the end user experience (QoE)?
• How can the service provider bridge QoE and QoS, and change the QoS level based on spending limits?
• How can different IP flows of the same packet data network (PDN) be routed via different accesses? In addition, how is it possible to move IP flows of the same PDN from one access to another for seamless WLAN offload or for usage of WLAN access to connect to Internet without traversing operator's core network?
• How can selected IP traffic be offloaded from the cellular infrastructure and save transmission costs?
• How can mobile networks be optimized for mass machine-type communications/applications?
• How to optimize the utilization of Digital Dividend (unprecedented amount of spectrum that becomes available as a result of the switchover from analog to digital terrestrial TV)?

This timely feature topic issue of IEEE Communications Magazine will bring together researchers from industry, academia and standardization bodies to present and analyze the above challenging issues in the important area of managing traffic for existing and future mobile broadband networks, i.e. within and beyond the existing standardization frameworks (3GPP, 3GPP2, IEEE 802.16, etc.). We are soliciting original research, analysis of live networks or test beds, and survey articles written in a tutorial style, comprehensible to all readers of the magazine. Submissions will undergo a rigorous peer review process. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• IP flow mobility, seamless WLAN / Femtocell offload and related policy control
• Network enhancements, such as signaling management, local IP access and selected IP traffic offload (internet traffic, corporate traffic, etc.), packet scheduling and prioritization
• Network improvements for mass machine-type communications
• Compression, rate-adaptation and transcoding
• Device-based traffic management techniques
• Contention management and tuning TCP/IP
• Deep packet inspection, policy-based traffic shaping & differential charging
• Segmentation by users, services, devices, technology, etc.
• End-to-end service assurance and QoE monitoring
• Caching, multicast and CDNs for http-based streaming and download services
• Network operations, pricing and billing, network and service management
• Software/middleware architectures and solutions
• QoS-oriented network planning
• Digital Dividend for mobile broadband services

Manuscript Submission and Schedule

Articles should be tutorial in nature and written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the article. References should be limited to 10, figures and tables to a combined total of 6 (mathematical equations should be avoided). Paper length should not exceed 4,500 words. Complete guidelines can be found at http://dl.comsoc.org/livepubs/ci1/info/sub_guidelines.html.
All articles must be submitted through the IEEE Manuscript Central at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80/commag-ieee.

• Full Paper Submission Deadline: 4 Feb 2011
• Decisions Notification: 22 May 2011
• Final Manuscripts Due: 30 June 2011
• Publication of Special Issue: Second Half of 2011

Guest Editors

Dr. David Soldani (Corresponding Editor)
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
European Research Centre
Ries str. 25, 80992, Munich, Germany
E-mail: david.soldani@huawei.com

Prof. Sajal K. Das
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University Texas at Arlington
P.O. Box 19015, Arlington, TX 76019, USA
E-mail: das@cse.uta.edu

Prof. Mahbub Hassan
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Kensington, Sydney 2052, Australia
E-mail: mahbub@cse.unsw.edu.au

Dr. Jahan A. Hassan
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Kensington, Sydney 2052, Australia
E-mail: jahan@cse.unsw.edu.au

Dr. Giridhar D. Mandyam
Qualcomm Inc.
5775 Morehouse Drive
San Diego, California 92121, USA
Email: mandyam@qualcomm.com