MobiWac 2021

Welcome to the 19th ACM International Symposium on Mobility Management and Wireless Access (MobiWac’21). This year, the MobiWac symposium was planned to be held at Alicante (Spain), but unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year's edition will exceptionally be held online from November 22nd to November 26th, 2021. Over the years, MobiWac has established itself as a leading venue that brings together scientists, engineers, and practitioners every year to share experiences and discuss some of the best research works and breakthrough advancements in mobility next-generation wireless and mobile networks, IoT networks, Cyber-Physical Systems, ubiquitous and mobile accesses, QoS management, security, and next-gen network testbeds.

In this year's edition, the call for papers has attracted a large number of high-quality submissions from all over the world, reflecting the worldwide visibility and the international profile of MobiWac. The Technical Program Committee has accepted 20 papers, representing an acceptance ratio of 26%. Every paper submitted has been peer-reviewed by at least three referees from the Technical Program Committee. The accepted papers cover a wide variety of topics including 5G and beyond networks, mobility management and mobile vehicular networks, and IoT. Among the accepted full regular papers, the following three were shortlisted as candidates for the Mirela S.M.A. Notare MobiWac Best Paper Award:

• Minimizing Rate Variability with Effective Resource Utilization in 5G Networks by Fidan Mehmeti and Thomas La Porta (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
• Desynchronization and MitM Attacks Against Neighbor Awareness Networking Using OpenNAN by Lars Almon, Arno Krause and Oliver Fietze (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany), Matthias Hollick (Technische Universität Darmstadt & Secure Mobile Networking Lab, Germany)
• An Innovative Neuro-Genetic Algorithm and Geometric Loss Function for Mobility Prediction by Stylianos Tsanakas (National Technical University of Athens, Greece), Aroosa Hameed, John Violos and Aris Leivadeas (École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada).

During the symposium, a committee composed of renowned and respectable experts will evaluate the regular papers and select a winner for the best paper award. The best paper award will be announced at the symposium closing event and will be featured in the proceedings of MobiWac 2022. At this point, we take the opportunity to congratulate the winners of the best paper award for MobiWac 2020:

• The Impact of COVID-19 Confinement on Regional Mobility of Spatial-Temporal Social Networks by Munairah Aljeri (Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait).

MobiWac 2021 excellent and thought-provoking technical program is the result of the hard work and dedication of many colleagues. We would like to acknowledge those who have handled the many details related to the event. We would like to thank the authors for their contributions to the symposium, as well as the Technical Program Committee members and reviewers who helped us to assess paper submissions in a timely and impartial manner. We would like to thank the Tutorials Chair, Antonio A. F. Loureiro (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil), Poster/Demo Chair, Valeria Loscri (Inria, France), and the Publicity Co-Chair, Mirela Notare (Technology University on Fly Transportation, Brazil) for their active engagement in this event. We want to recognize and remember Professor Mirela Notare, co-founder of the Mobiwac symposium for her great professional career and her collaboration with the MobiWac symposium. We want to give her our sincere gratitude and she will always be remembered in our community. The best Paper Award of Mobiwac will be provided under her name from this year.

Special thanks go to all the members of the Steering Committee for their guidance and valuable advice during the whole phase of symposium planning, and ACM production of the proceedings. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our sponsor, ACM and ACM SIGSIM for their continued support of these successful symposia. Finally, many thanks to all of you for your participation.
We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking and that the symposium will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.

Azzedine Boukerche, University of Ottawa, Canada (General Chair)
Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou, University of New Mexica, USA (Program Co-Chair)
Rodolfo W. L. Coutinho, Concordia University, Canada (Program Co-Chair)