Network measurement and monitoring play a vital role in the healthy operation of networks of all sizes, and find their applications in essentially all aspects of network management, including network traffic engineering, network capacity planning, billing, network security, network protocol, and algorithm testing. Network measurement and monitoring provide the essential techniques, algorithms, and tools for any informed decision-making process in network management.

On the other hand, today's networks are becoming increasingly more heterogeneous in terms of both network technologies and traffic, impacted by various factors including the wide deployment of wireless and sensor networks and the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer applications, network games, and VoIP. In addition, the network speed has been continuously increasing. Network attackers are also becoming more sophisticated in carrying out network attacks, recruiting zombie members, and hiding their true identities. All these developments pose profound challenges and present abounding opportunities in network measurement and monitoring research.

In this special issue, we solicit original work in all areas of network measurement and monitoring. In particular, we seek original work on identifying new research and development challenges and developing new techniques and algorithms in measurement based network management. Specific topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Measurement based billing
• Measurement based admission control
• Measurement techniques
• Large scale network data measurement and characterization studies
• Measurement data management
• Network measurement of new test-bed
• Tools for network performance evaluation
• Measurement based network reliability, dependability, and security techniques
• Autonomous management platform
• Management issues for next generation network