LAUSR

Since its initial edition in 2009, the Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI) conference has aimed at providing a meeting point for researchers and people working on the mobile and wireless networking realm. The rapid advances of the corresponding technologies, together with the increasing demands from the end users and the appearance of new services, are some of the causes of the ever evolving requirements and challenges that need to be tackled. Together with the conference, we started with a series of Special Issues (SI) of the Mobile Networks and Applications Journal in 2010. Our main objective was to gather works tackling some of the most interesting and current research challenges and issues. The call-for-papers of this SI was therefore an outcome of the 8th edition of the MONAMI conference, which was held at the University of New York, Abu-Dhabi, in October 2016. Thirty-three papers were received and reviewed by at least three independent and reputable referees. As a result of the process, five manuscripts were selected to be included in this SI. We believe that they together provide a very interesting range of topics that are being currently looked at by the scientific community (and industry) within the wide area of mobile networks and their management. The five papers are indeed tackling different aspects on wireless technologies, with a clear focus on next generation mobile networks (5G). We start the SI with the paper entitled "The Network Cloud Use Cases and Challenges", where M. Hoffmann et al. go beyond previous works on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), with a clearer view on the challenges that need to be faced when implementing these components over real mobile networks. The paper argues that most of the existing works on this aspect overlook a number of practical design considerations, recalling that little effort has been made on solving the performance issues that may appear when moving from lab and cloud environments to real networks. They exploit an implementation over commercial off-the-shelf hardware to study I/O performance problems, which are identified as one of the biggest challenges of SDN/NFV. The developed framework is used to analyze two complementary use cases for mobile networks: (1) disaggregation of mobile network gateways, and (2) security applications for mobile networks. The paper finishes with an outlook of the most relevant open challenges, which shall also include the design of appropriate migration strategies. Next, I. Tsai et al. propose, in their paper "Streamlined Paging for Recurrent Mobility Tracking", exploiting predictability of end-user mobility to improve location tracking in mobile networks. The paper arguments that some of the architectural ingredients of 5G, such as ultra-dense network deployments or the C-RAN approach discussed in the previous paper, pose clear challenges to the latency requirement that needs to be guaranteed. They propose reducing the cost (delay) of paging mechanisms to foster the 5G lightweight connectivity. They combine a generic location management framework (cell masking) with a context mapping process. The former allows a more precise location (down to the cell level), while the latter process relies on information provided * Ramón Agüero [email protected]