Recent years have witnessed very remarkable technological advances in both hardware miniaturization (availability of enough powerful micro-devices at reasonable prices with communication capabilities) and associated software and service developments. Their target applications cover a broad spectrum of services, ranging from general public applications (health services, smart cities services, automotive services, etc.) to specialized applications (military, industrial, etc.). The development of such services and their deployment raise several open research challenges, among them Quality of service (QoS) and Security.

Quality of Service is intrinsically related to the requirements of the end users/applications. It can be declined under various metrics: technological metrics (throughput maximization, delay, and energy minimization, etc.) as well as user experience metrics (quality of data, completeness of the information, etc.). The recent developments have widened the perimeter of QoS to include new aspects and the corresponding metrics/constraints such as quality of the captured data, quality of the transmission, quality of the local processing due to intrinsic limitations (memory and computing), etc. This is a consequence of the used hardware, known to be more prone to failures, and of the development of the associated software, usually characterized by low-level abstraction (i.e., close to the hardware primitives for performance reasons). Another issue related to QoS is the increased importance of scalability for the proposed services, raised by the need of large scale deployment, as the expected number of devices used in an application may be of the order of thousands. Those new conditions call for a paradigm shift in terms of concepts and techniques handling QoS within micro-services.

Closely connected to QoS, the objectives related to privacy, security, and trust have become a significant challenge, mainly due to the extensive dissemination of these micro-services in our private lives, for instance in health monitoring, home control, e-payments, etc. Techniques addressing these issues aim at ensuring that the provided micro-services will protect the users’ data and provide guarantees that no malicious device will affect the system decisions, under the additional constraints of granting a given QoS level.

The objective of this special issue is to explore recent advances in QoS and Security in software for wireless and mobile micro-services.

Topics

• Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
• Wireless and mobile network security (WLAN, PCS, Ad hoc and Sensor Networks, Wireless Mesh, etc. )
• QoS for wireless networks,
• Intrusion detection in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks
• Privacy and authentication
• QoS for wireless multimedia systems, VoIP QoS
• Quality of control of wireless networks
• Power and energy management
• Wireless video surveillance networks
• QoS in the Wireless Internet
• QoS and Routing
• QoS Metrics
• QoS of Wireless Network Services
• Wireless Network Survivability
• QoS and Reliability
• Image Quality in Wireless Video-Surveillance Networks
• QoS provisioning in wireless multimedia systems
• Wireless and mobile systems and applications
• Performance Modeling and Simulation Techniques
• Mobile security: device, application, and data security
• Game Theoretical modeling of QoS and Security

Guest Editors

Ahmed Mostefaoui, University of Franche-Comte, France. Email: ahmed.mostefaoui@univ-fcomte.fr
Gabriele Gianini, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Email: gabriele.gianini@unimi.it
Ernesto Damiani,  Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Email: ernesto.damiani@unimi.it
Geon Min, University of Exeter, UK. Email: g.min@exeter.ac.uk

Major Guidelines

This Special Issue invites novel contributions that advance the state-of-the-art in the above areas. Manuscripts that extend research published previously (e.g., in conference or workshop proceedings) will only be considered if they include at least 50% of significantly new material; the submission of such manuscripts must be accompanied by a “Summary of Differences” letter explaining how the authors extended their previously published work.

Submission Guidelines

All submitted manuscripts must be formatted according to Computing’s instructions for authors which are available at https://www.springer.com/607. We will accept both LaTeX manuscripts (which must use Springer templates at https://www/springer.com/607) and word manuscripts (for which no templates are available).

Manuscript length

Please note that the page limit for Special Issue submissions differs from that of regular Computing submissions. Manuscripts submitted to the Special Issue should not exceed 18 pages. Submission that do not comply with this requirement are likely to be desk rejected without being reviewed.

Submission instruction

Manuscripts should be submitted using the online submission system at (http://www.springer.com/607). When submitting a manuscript for this special issue, authors should take care to select ‘QoS and security in software for wireless and mobile micro-services’.