IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Socially Enabled Networking and Computing (2018) IEEE Access, 6, art. no. 8570978, pp. 72037-72040

This Special Section in IEEE ACCESS entitled “Socially enabled networking and computing” was motivated by the following observation: in recent years, mobile social networks, (i.e. the networks of individuals with similar interests connected to each other through their mobile devices) is emerging as a source of information to achieve high efficiency communication and networking with better performance on key metrics of lower delay, better coverage, higher data rate, etc. Mobile devices are now powerful enough to form cooperative groups, assisting each other by sharing communication and computation resources. In such a scenario, critical technical problems should be solved to realize these potential benefits, i.e., how to efficiently utilize the computing and communication capabilities among these smart devices, and how to facilitate mobile computing for human-computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be mobile in the network during normal usage. In addition to these technical challenges, another major problem is to understand human behaviors and further utilize them in the mobile social networks to facilitate the benefits of considering human’s social relations and behaviors in mobile computing, communication, and networking.