The 8th International Conference on Ad-Hoc Networks and Wireless (ADHOC-NOW 2009) was held September 22-25, 2009 in Murcia, Spain. Since ADHOCNOW started as a workshop in 2002, it has become a well-established and well-known international conference dedicated to wireless and mobile c- puting. During the last few years it has been held in Toronto, Canada (2002), Montreal, Canada (2003), Vancouver, Canada (2004), Cancun, Mexico (2005), Ottawa, Canada (2006), Morelia, Mexico (2007) and Sophia Antipolis, France (2008). The conference serves as a forum for interesting discussions on ongoing research and new contributions addressing both experimental and theoretical research in the area of ad hoc networks, mesh networks, sensor networks and vehicular networks. In 2009, we recived 92 submissions from 28 di?erent countries around the globe: Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Finland, France, G- many, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico,Norway,Poland,Portugal,Serbia,SouthAfrica,Spain,Tunisia,UKand USA. Of the submitted papers, we selected 24 full papers and 10 short papers for publication in the proceedings and presentation in the conference.

Practical ad hoc networks have unique challenges, such as constant network topology changes, bandwidth-constrained connections and diverse wireless signal fading scenarios. This book presents the design and evaluation of novel and efficient control mechanisms for channel access scheduling and topology control functions in ad hoc networks. The work is based on the neighbor-aware contention resolution (NCR) algorithm, which use only local neighborhood information to achieve globally consistent decisions, thus applicable to solve various control problems in ad hoc networks that required high control overhead before. First, channel access protocols based on NCR are presented for ad hoc networks with omni-directional antennas, namely NAMA, LAMA, PAMA and HAMA, which correspond to node-, link-, pair-wise- and hybrid-activation multiple access protocols, respectively. Furthermore, the collision-free channel access functions for ad hoc networks that have unidirectional links or directional antennas are presented, which were difficult if not impossible to achieve without NCR. NCR-based topology management that constructs a backbone structure in ad hoc networks is presented as well.