The Internet continues to witness an explosive growth in terms of hosts, services, and users. Recent technological developments in networking, hardware, and software are enabling a wide range of services and applications. Significant advances have been made at all levels in the network hierarchy ranging from new applications to service-aware networking protocols and hardware. New challenges have also emerged. Many of these challenges are strongly related to the management of heterogeneous networking infrastructures and resources, the collaboration between service providers, the monitoring of access to services, and Quality of Service (QoS) issues.This special issue is dedicated to original and state-of-the-art results achieved by active researchers, designers, and developers working on various issues and challenges related to emerging networking technologies and services.