Special Section on Wireless Network Behaviour and Design

Wireless networking is emerging as one of the most common modes of building a variety of network infrastructure, and yet it is evident that current understanding of even the most basic primitives of wireless networking architectures and systems design remain largely unknown. There are many reasons for this including the very nature of the unguided channel and interactions in the complex cyber-physical system, both at the physical layer as well as complex behaviours of the end users and devices. Usage patterns follow social interaction laws and constraints and machineto- machine communication in such specialised environments as sensor networks create behaviours not before seen in the fixed networks and much of the acquired common wisdom has been overturned. In this new world, research becomes perhaps even more important than ever before, in order to bring order to the increased complexity of the systems and to provide the basic understanding to be able to properly engineer wireless networks to meet performance demands and predictable behaviour. This issue of Computer Communications presents papers covering a variety of aspects of wireless networks and shed new light on their performance and behaviour. We present a collection of strong contributions, extended archival versions of shorter papers originally presented in the 14th ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM). The papers represent recent advances in wireless network modeling in a variety of problem areas, which highlight the breadth of the problem space in the field.