The concept of cooperative communications for wireless networks, such as cellular networks, sensor networks, and wireless ad hoc networks, has recently attracted considerable attention. Different from conventional point-to-point communications, cooperative communications and networking allows different users or nodes in a wireless network to share resources to create collaboration through distributed transmission/processing, in which each user's information is sent out not only by the user, but also by collaborating users. Cooperative communications and networking is a new communication paradigm promising significant capacity and multiplexing gain increase in wireless networks. It realizes a new form of space diversity to combat the effects of severe fading that has been termed cooperative diversity, and it is also helpful in reducing complexity of routing problems and realizing seamless networking. Although some initial understanding of cooperative communication schemes has been demonstrated in recent years, many more problems related to developing practical and effective cooperative communication systems have emerged or remain open. This issue tries to collect cutting-edge research achievements in this area. We solicit papers that present original and unpublished work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Cooperative system architecture and protocol design
• System capacity, outage probability, performance analysis and optimization
• MIMO cooperative communications and distributed space-time coding
• Differential/non-coherent cooperation systems
• Cooperative multimedia (including speech, audio, image, and video) communications and networking
• Resource allocation and management for coopertive communictions
• Cooperative routing and scheduling for sensor networks and ad hoc networks
• Cross-layer design in cooperative communicaitons and networking
• Impact of cooperation in cellular networks, WLAN, and existing standards.

Prospective authors should follow the IEEE J-SAC manuscript format described in the Information for Authors. The paper should be formatted to print on either A4 or letter paper with no longer than 20 double-spaced pages, excluding illustrations and figures. Prospective authors should send a PDF version of their manuscript with a cover page, which contains the paper title, authors with contact information, and a 150-word abstract, to http://dsplab.eng.umd.edu/jsac-ccn/. The following timetable applies: