Guest Editorial: Transport Layer Innovations for Future Networks

The communication technologies used for Internet connectivity have radically changed since the 1980s, when the current design of the TCP/IP stack was introduced. Most of the traffic will soon be generated by mobile devices, connected to different generations of wireless networks, which now can provide to end users a multi-gigabit-per-second data rate. Mobile devices are more and more heterogeneous, and support connectivity over different interfaces and networks. Similarly, the capacity of fixed and backhaul networks has dramatically increased, thanks to advances in optical communications.