Guest Editorial for Special Issue on Emerging Peer to Peer (P2P) Network Technologies for Pervasive and Mobile Computing

The growing relevance of pervasive and mobile computing (PMC) is manifest. Ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, and last mile connectivity based applications will be the future of mobile applications. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) will play an important role in such applications, by enabling peers to collaborate spontaneously in an overlay network by using appropriate information and communication systems without the necessity for a central coordination. A P2P overlay network is a robust, distributed and fault-tolerant network architecture for sharing resources like CPU, memory and files. Mobile and wireless technology have experienced great progress in recent years. There are several research challenges in the design of an efficient P2P-based network, e.g. the design of a flexible structure (like ring, chord, 3D or other multidimensional structure), avoiding mismatch between physical and logical networks, having a flexible structure that can accommodate dynamic joining and departure of nodes, routing and forwarding of queries. Also, P2P networks have been used in the emerging networks, such as smart grids cognitive radio networks, online social networks and data center networks, for the support of various applications like routing information maintenance, data storage and retrieval, and location service.