Mission-Critical Networking (MCN) refers to networking for application domains where
life or livelihood may be at risk. Typical application domains for MCN include critical
infrastructure protection and operation, emergency and crisis intervention, healthcare services,
and military operations. Such networking is essential for safety, security and economic vitality in
our complex world characterized by uncertainty, heterogeneity, emergent behaviors, and the need
for reliable and timely response. MCN should comprise networking technology, infrastructures
and services that may alleviate the risk and directly enable and enhance connectivity for mission-
critical information exchange among diverse, widely-dispersed, mobile users. A primary
challenge to MCN is to deploy and dynamically configure and evolve communication networks
that are dependable, autonomic, secure, adaptive, and rapidly deployable to support critical
missions and their priorities. In order to operate effectively, the deployed networks should
support services such as location determination of both authorized and unauthorized entities,
quality-of-service aware audio and video communication, emergency calling and alerting, and in-
situ and remote sensing and control in a secure and dependable manner. In addition, efficient
operation of such networks that typically include numerous resource-constrained components
may benefit from cross-layer optimization, cognition, resource engineering, on-demand
federation, and service-oriented architecture. Also important is the integration of MCN with the
Internet to reduce cost of deployment and maintenance and to enhance reachability and ubiquity.
This special issue of the Journal on Selected Areas in Communications solicits high quality
technical contributions in mission-critical networking including, but not limited to:

• Architecture and design of MCN and next-
generation emergency calling and alerting
• Rapidly and dynamically deployable services and
networks
• Evolving “elastic” networking with decentralized
and peer-to-peer resource management and allocation
• Federation and policy management for
heterogeneous networks and protocols
•Trust, security, dependability, privacy, QoS and
performance awareness and management for MCN
• Sensor and actuator networks for
critical information gathering, tracking
and real-time control
• MCN traffic and mobility analysis
• Formal methodology for cognitive,
autonomic, and context-aware protocols
and network management
• Spectrum management and access
• Testbeds, benchmarks, performance and
experimental studies

Paper Submission
Manuscripts should describe original, previously unpublished work, not currently under
review. Argument justifying contribution specific to the unique features of MCN must be
provided. Prospective authors should follow the IEEE JSAC manuscript format described in the
Information for Authors at http://www.jsac.ucsd.edu/Guidelines/info.html. Authors should submit
a PDF version of their complete manuscript to mcn-jsac@criticalnet.org according to the
following timetable:
Manuscript submission: April 1, 2009 First review notification: August 1, 2009
Revised manuscript due: October 1, 2009 Acceptance notification: November 1, 2009
Final manuscript due: January 2, 2010 Publication: June, 2010

Guest Editors
- Mohamed Eltoweissy, Virginia Tech, USA - Silvia Giordano, SUPSI, Switzerland
- Mohamed Gouda, University of Texas, USA - Moustafa Youssef, Nile University, Egypt
- Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University, USA - Mario Gerla, UCLA, USA
- David Du, National Science Foundation and University of Minnesota, USA