WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND MOBILE COMPUTING Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2010; 10:593–595 Published online 4 January 2010 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/wcm.883 Guest Editorial Special issue on ‘‘quality of service and security in wireless and mobile networks’’ Recently, wireless and mobile communication sys- tems have become increasingly popular as an inex- pensive and promising means for ubiquitous communications and mobile computing. This trend will continue to affect the way in which we live, work, and play with innovative services based on the perva- sive and mobile communications support. A prelimin- ary condition for those services to become widely used is the effective support of quality of service (QoS) and security properties. For this reason, QoS and security management of wireless and mobile communication systems are very important issues for the future generation of wireless and mobile net- works and services, and the design and management of solutions for QoS and security are some of the most challenging research tasks, in scenarios like the wire- less and mobile systems, characterized by new as- sumptions and limitations. The main limitations typically involve the resources like battery energy, computation, and bandwidth. The new assumptions include the unprecedented dynamics caused by mo- bility, heterogeneity, variable channel conditions, the traffic characterization of new emerging applications, the open communication nature, and the distributed management architecture of wireless communication systems, like the wireless ad hoc, mesh, vehicular, and sensor networks. This special issue brings together nine contribu- tions, selected from a total of 25 submissions, that address the issues of architectures, technologies, and protocols for wireless and mobile communication systems. The selected papers propose and analyze some of the most interesting and innovative solutions dealing with the QoS and Security management in wireless mobile networks, from different viewpoints, including the QoS-based channel time allocation and scheduling in IEEE 802.15.3 wireless PANs, QoS analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 Low rate WPAN technol- ogy in industrial application scenarios, QoS routing with obstacle avoidance properties in wireless sensor network scenarios, QoS, and the impact of security solutions on performance in wireless sensor networks, security architectures over QoS-aware multi-operator wireless mesh networks, low-overhead secure time synchronization in heterogeneous wireless sensor net- works, secure routing protocols with privacy protec- tion for mobile ad hoc networks, secure pre- authentication-based network access protocols for mobile ad hoc networks, and protocol enhancements against jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks. The paper ‘‘Scheduling Channel Time Allocations in 802.15.3 WPANs for Supporting Multimedia Applications’’ by G. Boggia, P. Camarda, and L. A. Grieco [1] proposes and evaluates a Channel Time Allocation scheduling scheme providing bounded average delays to multimedia applications in IEEE 802.15.3 WPANs; the paper ‘‘Simulation study of IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN for industrial applications’’ by Feng Chen, Nan Wang, Reinhard German, and Falko Dressler [2] provides guidelines for the QoS support, design and deployment of IEEE 802.15.4- based sensor networks in industrial applications sce- narios, by performing an extensive modeling and simulation analysis of the effect of protocol para- meters; the paper ‘‘Securing Multi-operator Based QoS-aware Mesh Networks: Requirements and Design Options’’ by I. Askoxylakis, B. Bencsath, L. Buttyan, L. Dora, V. Siris, D. Szili, I. Vajda [3] provides an overview on the available design options for a security architecture to manage multiple security issues over QoS-aware mesh networks operated by multiple op- erators in a cooperative manner; the paper ‘‘Path Quality Detection Algorithms for Near Optimal Geo- graphic Routing in Sensor Networks with Obstacles’’ by Luminita Moraru, Pierre Leone, Sotiris Nikolet- seas, and Jose Rolim [4] proposes and analyses a novel geographic routing algorithm, with obstacle avoidance properties, suitable for low resources sce- narios like the wireless sensor networks; the paper ’’Secure Timing Synchronization for Heterogeneous Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.