This SpringerBrief offers two concrete design examples for traffic offloading. The first is an optimal resource allocation for small-cell based traffic offloading that aims at minimizing mobile users' data cost. The second is an optimal resource allocation for device-to-device assisted traffic offloading that also minimizes the total energy consumption and cellular link usage (while providing an overview of the challenging issues). Both examples illustrate the importance of proper resource allocation to the success of traffic offloading, show the consequent performance advantages of executing optimal resource allocation, and present the methodologies to achieve the corresponding optimal offloading solution for traffic offloading in heterogeneous cellular networks. The authors also include an overview of heterogeneous cellular networks and explain different traffic offloading paradigms ranging from uplink traffic offloading through small cells to downlink traffic offloading via mobile device-to-device cooperation.
This brief is an excellent resource for postgraduate students studying advanced-level topics in wireless communications and networking. Researchers, engineers and professionals working in related fields will also find this brief a valuable resource tool.


This brief examines current research on improving Vehicular Networks (VANETs), examining spectrum scarcity due to the dramatic growth of mobile data traffic and the limited bandwidth of dedicated vehicular communication bands and the use of opportunistic spectrum bands to mitigate congestion. It reviews existing literature on the use of opportunistic spectrum bands for VANETs, including licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands and a variety of related technologies, such as cognitive radio, WiFi and device-to-device communications. Focused on analyzing spectrum characteristics, designing efficient spectrum exploitation schemes, and evaluating the date delivery performance when utilizing different opportunistic spectrum bands, the results presented in this brief provide valuable insights on improving the design and deployment of future VANETs.

This SpringerBrief focuses on the network capacity analysis of VANETs, a key topic as fundamental guidance on design and deployment of VANETs is very limited. Moreover, unique characteristics of VANETs impose distinguished challenges on such an investigation. This SpringerBrief first introduces capacity scaling laws for wireless networks and briefly reviews the prior arts in deriving the capacity of VANETs. It then studies the unicast capacity considering the socialized mobility model of VANETs. With vehicles communicating based on a two-hop relaying scheme, the unicast capacity bound is derived and can be applied to predict the throughput of real-world scenarios of VANETs.

The downlink capacity of VANETs is also investigated in which access infrastructure is deployed to provide pervasive Internet access to vehicles. Different alternatives of wireless access infrastructure are considered. A lower bound of downlink capacity is derived for each type of access infrastructure. The last section of this book presents a case study based on a perfect city grid to examine the capacity-cost trade-offs of different deployments since the deployment costs of different access infrastructure are highly variable.

This SpringerBrief offers a comprehensive review and in-depth discussion of the current research on resource management. The authors explain how to best utilize harvested energy and temporally available licensed spectrum. Throughout the brief, the primary focus is energy and spectrum harvesting sensor networks (ESHNs) including energy harvesting (EH)-powered spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum access.
To efficiently collect data through the available licensed spectrum, this brief examines the joint management of energy and spectrum. An EH-powered spectrum sensing and management scheme for Heterogeneous Spectrum Harvesting Sensor Networks (HSHSNs) is presented in this brief. The scheme dynamically schedules the data sensing and spectrum access of sensors in ESHSNs to optimize the network utility, while considering the stochastic nature of EH process, PU activities and channel conditions.
This brief also provides useful insights for the practical resource management scheme design for ESHSNs and motivates a new line of thinking for future sensor networking. Professionals, researchers, and advanced-level students in electrical or computer engineering will find the content valuable.

This Springer Brief focuses on cognitive resource management in heterogeneous cellular networks (Het Net) with small cell deployment for the LTE-Advanced system. It introduces the Het Net features, presents practical approaches using cognitive radio technology in accommodating small cell data relay and optimizing resource allocation and examines the effectiveness of resource management among small cells given limited coordination bandwidth and wireless channel uncertainty. The authors introduce different network characteristics of small cell, investigate the mesh of small cell access points in parallel with macrocells in network control and resource management and address resource management in the backhaul with coordination constraints and wireless channel uncertainty. The final section of this brief summarizes and provides future research directions for this topic, including a proposed framework that has been evaluated through realistic simulations. Cognitive Resource Management for Heterogeneous Cellular Networks is designed for researchers and professionals working in wireless communications and networks. Advanced-level students studying electrical and computer engineering should also find the content helpful.

This book provides an in-depth discussion on how to efficiently manage resources of heterogeneous wireless networks and how to design resource allocation algorithms to suit real world conditions. Efficiently managing resources of the networks is more crucial now, than ever before, to meet users' rapidly increasing demand for higher data rates, better quality-of-service (QoS) and seamless coverage. Some of the techniques that can be incorporated within heterogeneous wireless networks to achieve this objective are interworking of the networks, user multi-homing and device-to-device (D2D) communication.

Designing resource allocation algorithms to suit real world conditions is also important, as the algorithms should be deployable and perform well in real networks. For example, two of the conditions considered in this book are resource allocation intervals of different networks are different and small cell base stations have limited computational capacity. To address the first condition, resource allocation algorithms for interworking systems are designed to allocate resources of different networks at different time-scales. To address the second condition, resource allocation algorithms are designed to be able to run at cloud computing servers. More of such conditions, algorithms designed to suit these conditions, modeling techniques for various networks and performance analysis of the algorithms are discussed in the book.

This book concludes with a discussion on the future research directions on the related fields of study. Advanced-level students focused on communication and networking will use this book as a study guide. Researchers and experts in the fields of networking, converged networks, small-cell networks, resource management, and interference management, as well as consultants working in network planning and optimization and managers, executives and network architects working in the networking industry will also find this book useful as a reference.


This brief presents research results on social cognitive radio networks, a transformational and innovative networking paradigm that promotes the nexus between social interactions and cognitive radio networks. Along with a review of the research literature, the text examines the key motivation and challenges of social cognitive radio network design. Three socially inspired distributed spectrum sharing mechanisms are introduced: adaptive channel recommendation mechanism, imitation-based social spectrum sharing mechanism, and evolutionarily stable spectrum access mechanism. The brief concludes with a discussion of future research directions which ascertains that exploiting social interactions for distributed spectrum sharing will advance the state-of-the-art of cognitive radio network design, spur a new line of thinking for future wireless networks, and enable novel wireless service and applications.

This SpringerBrief covers the security and privacy challenges in fog computing, and proposes a new secure and privacy-preserving mechanisms to resolve these challenges for securing fog-assisted IoT applications. Chapter 1 introduces the architecture of fog-assisted IoT applications and the security and privacy challenges in fog computing. Chapter 2 reviews several promising privacy-enhancing techniques and illustrates examples on how to leverage these techniques to enhance the privacy of users in fog computing. Specifically, the authors divide the existing privacy-enhancing techniques into three categories: identity-hidden techniques, location privacy protection and data privacy enhancing techniques. The research is of great importance since security and privacy problems faced by fog computing impede the healthy development of its enabled IoT applications.

With the advanced privacy-enhancing techniques, the authors propose three secure and privacy-preserving protocols for fog computing applications, including smart parking navigation, mobile crowdsensing and smart grid. Chapter 3 introduces identity privacy leakage in smart parking navigation systems, and proposes a privacy-preserving smart parking navigation system to prevent identity privacy exposure and support efficient parking guidance retrieval through road-side units (fogs) with high retrieving probability and security guarantees. Chapter 4 presents the location privacy leakage, during task allocation in mobile crowdsensing, and propose a strong privacy-preserving task allocation scheme that enables location-based task allocation and reputation-based report selection without exposing knowledge about the location and reputation for participators in mobile crowdsensing. Chapter 5 introduces the data privacy leakage in smart grid, and proposes an efficient and privacy-preserving smart metering protocol to allow collectors (fogs) to achieve real-time measurement collection with privacy-enhanced data aggregation. Finally, conclusions and future research directions are given in Chapter 6.

This brief validates the significant feature extension and efficiency improvement of IoT devices without sacrificing the security and privacy of users against dishonest fog nodes. It also provides valuable insights on the security and privacy protection for fog-enabled IoT applications. Researchers and professionals who carry out research on security and privacy in wireless communication will want to purchase this SpringerBrief. Also, advanced level students, whose main research area is mobile network security will also be interested in this SpringerBrief.



This brief presents a unified analytical framework for the evaluation of drive-thru Internet performance and accordingly proposes an optimal spatial access control management approach. A comprehensive overview and in-depth discussion of the research literature is included. It summarizes the main concepts and methods, and highlights future research directions. The brief also introduces a novel cooperative vehicular communication framework together with a delicate linear cluster formation scheme and low-delay content forwarding approach to provide a flexible and efficient vehicular content distribution in the drive-thru Internet. The presented medium access control and vehicular content distribution related research results in this brief provide useful insights for the design approach of Wi-Fi enabled vehicular communications and it motivates a new line of thinking for the performance enhancements of future vehicular networking. Advanced-level students, researchers and professionals interested in vehicular networks or coordinated network sharing will find Cooperative Vehicular Communications in the Drive-thru Internet a valuable reference.