Special Section on Advanced Transfer Technologies for the Next Generation Network
Koichiro Wakasugi · IEICE Transactions on Communications · 2007
Special Section on Advanced Transfer Technologies for the Next Generation NetworkThe Next Generation Network (NGN) intends to integrate public phone service and data service networks seamlessly to create a multi-service network.To support new services and applications, the NGNs are expected to be a complex system interconnecting different technologies and various architectures across diverse software platforms.Therefore, there are numerous technical issues to be solved.Among these, one of the most important ones is a realization of high-speed transfer technologies with various functionalities for the NGNs; it also includes these issues of implementations of access, metro and core networks and QoS-enabled transport technologies.The Technical Committee on Communication Systems of the Communication Society in IEICE organized the special section to examine the current technical issues.The Call for Papers attracted 43 submissions from academia and industry, and from China, Korea, Taiwan and U.S. as well as from Japan.The submission was evaluated with the help of the distinguished reviewers.The careful evaluation process has allowed us to accept only five high-quality papers.The acceptance rate for this special section was around 10%.The special section consists of one invited paper and four selected papers.The invited paper is an excellent introduction on the functional architecture of NGN, focusing on how the NGNs can be constructed and use various functionalities to provide the expected services.Our sincere gratitude goes to all the authors who submitted their high-quality work to this special section.