Communication networks and computing systems have demonstrated their importance in the past few decades as a fundamental driver of economic growth. Over the years, they have not only expanded in their sizes, such as geographical area and number of terminals, but also in the variety of services, users, and deployment environments. The purpose of resource allocation in such environments is to intelligently assign the limited available resources among terminals/clients in an efficient way to satisfy end users' service requirements.

With the dramatic developments and fast evolution of communication networks and computing systems, resource allocation continues to be the fundamental challenge because better quality of service is required with the increasing demand for bandwidth-hungry and/or computation-intensive services. In particular, it has to cope with various new emerging system architectures, such as cognitive networks, mesh networks, multihop networks, peer-to-peer networks, multistandard networks, cloud computing systems, and data centers. Moreover, distributed intelligence in a multitude of devices operating autonomously enables shifting traditional centralized allocation mechanisms into fully distributed solutions. In recent years, many tools including optimization theory, control theory, game theory, and auction theory have been employed to model and solve a variety of practical resource allocation problems. Therefore, resource allocation in communication networks and computing systems is a pressing research topic that has huge applications. It is imperative to develop advanced resource allocation techniques for ensuring the optimal performance of these systems and networks.

The goal of this special issue is to bring together the most updated research contributions in this area. We are soliciting high quality, original, and unpublished work in resource allocation in communication networks and computing systems. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Resource allocation in cognitive networks, multihop networks, peer-to-peer networks, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, wireless sensor network, cognitive radio, and MIMO-OFDM systems
• Resource management in cloud environment and data centers
• Resource management for network virtualization
• Resource allocation for large-scale data mining systems
• Resource allocation for multimedia communication and streaming
• Resource allocation in large-scale, decentralized, dynamic, and heterogeneous networks
• Qos-aware (e.g. delay-aware and content-aware) resource allocation
• Dynamic resource allocation for time-varying systems
• Game theory and mechanism design for resource allocation
• Resource allocation algorithms based on pricing and auction
• Network utility maximization
• Resource scheduling and load balancing
• Scalability and robustness of resource allocation in large-scale systems and networks

Submissions of both in-depth research papers and review papers are encouraged.

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: