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Editorial:
Smart Living Technology Innovations
Mu-Yen Chen and Ruey-Shun Chen

A “Living Lab” is a system for achieving the future innovation environments in which real-life user-driven researches and innovations will be a co-creation technique for novel products, services and social infrastructures. A Living Lab takes advantage of pools of creative talent, socio-cultural diversity, and the unpredictability of inventiveness and imagination of end-users. In recent years, wireless and mobile communication networks have been broadly deployed and a huge influx of smart mobile devices and applications has given rise to mobile commerce, which stimulates the Living Labs with growth and diverse challenges. This special issue intends to investigate the smart living technology and its innovations around the Living Labs. However, there are still many challenging problems in improving the accuracy, robustness, efficiency, and user-friendliness of smart living technologies, and new problems are also emerging with new applications. Therefore, this special issue will present the latest developments, trends, industrial applications and management challenges for smart living technologies.

The current collection of articles comes from the open call for papers. Submissions to the special issue have been screened by the Guest Editors and reviewed by two referees to insure that they conform to the quality standards of Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks journal. In this special issue, we received total 18 papers and only accepted 7 papers to be published on this journal. The submission deadline was September 30, 2012. Then, each submission has gone through at least two review rounds and finished all the process on April 30, 2013.

The first paper [1], “Ontology based Road Traffic Management in emergency situations” by Bermejo, Villadangos, Astrain, Córdoba, Azpilicueta, Gárate, and Falcone integrate an ontology inside each vehicle to provide them with reasoning capabilities and avoid the use of a central point. Their system benefits traffic management in emergency situations with immediate suggestion to drivers where each vehicle is a decision point, reacts considering its neighboring vehicles, and collaborates with them to reach consensus in real time.

The next paper [2], “Developing a Smart Shopping Automation System: Ambient Intelligence in Practice” by Chen and Chang, propose an AmI enabled shopping environment a Shopping Automation System (SAS) with wireless communication technology and wireless sensors devices to raise customer satisfaction and improve firm competitiveness.

In the third paper [3] entitled “User Authentication with Anonymity for Roaming Service with Smart Cards in Global Mobility Networks”, from Chen, Huang, and Lai, present a new efficient authentication scheme for roaming user with a more secure and safe living environment. Finally, the proposed scheme is more suitable for mobile clients and smart-card users. It can be applied into mobile applications in the future smart living environments.

The next paper [4] entitled “Towards Two Hops Opportunistic Relaying with the Estimation of Residual Expected Delay”, by Jia, Chen, Xu, Yu, Xie, and Xiao devise a single-copy and a multi-copy two-hop forwarding algorithms to improve delivery ratio with a low delivery cost in opportunistic networks.

In the fifth paper [5] with the title “Infer Daily Mood using Mobile Phone Sensing”, Ma, Xu, Bai, Sun, and Zhu propose a novel framework called MoodMiner for assessing and analyzing mood in daily life. Their approach overcomes the problems of subjectivity and inconsistency of traditional mood assessment methods, and achieves a fairly good accuracy with minimal user intervention.

The next paper [6] entitled “Distributed Lighting System Based on Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks” by Mo, Xu, You, and Liu propose a distributed lighting system based on Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) to reduce the total energy consumption. In addition, this research also incorporates PID neural network (PIDNN) with Kalman filter (KF) to accomplish effective sensing and acting tasks. This paper demonstrates a promising performance of the integrated system responding to the light control, and hence the potential of further exploring.

In the last paper [7] with the title “Optimal Forwarding and Beaconing Control of Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks”, Wu, Deng, and Huang propose a theoretical model to evaluate the performance of the epidemic routing (ER) algorithm under different forwarding and beaconing rates, and then formulate a joint optimization problem. Finally, this paper obtains the optimal policy and proves that both the optimal forwarding and beaconing rates conform to the threshold form in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN).

We would like to thank the authors of these seven papers published in this special issue. In addition, we deeply appreciate all reviewers for their valuable time and best effort to review these papers with their useful comments and suggestions. Finally, we also want to thank Professor Ivan Stojmenovic, Editors-in-Chief of AHSWN. His sincere help and best support have made this special issue successfully. It is our hope that this collection of papers will demonstrate the current trends in smart living technology and future directions that may be taken in this field.

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