Sustainable Communication and Networking

Dear Colleagues,

Forecasts predict that the huge increase in consumer demand for data services driven by access to ever-smarter and more powerful devices is expected to continue beyond 2020. Accordingly, many academic, industrial, and policy initiatives have been working on the development of 5G mobile networks and the capabilities they will require to meet the future demands (e.g., higher data rates, widespread connectivity, flexible service creation, and low latency). 5G will integrate multiple networks serving diverse sectors, domains, and applications, such as VR/AR, IoT, UAVs, Smart Cities, etc. Current research efforts on 5G radio access networks strongly focus on millimeter-wave access for addressing a critical weakness of deployed cellular systems—that is, the capacity to realize enhanced mobile broadband services. Aside from this, mmWave technologies have reached a significant degree of maturity, and their state-of-the-art products are already on the market. Wireless engineers and business planners are now considering how to efficiently introduce and operate mmWave in 5G and beyond, where the answers to the question depend on the scenarios/use cases/services to be deployed, including mmWave V2X. To realize such requirements, it is essential to combine mmWave with multi-access edge computing (MEC), a technology allocating storage and computation resources at the edge of the network to reduce latency. However, how to combine them effectively has not been fully discussed, especially for critical applications of the strict latency constraints foreseen in 5G networks. Another critical issue in terms of cost is how to reduce OPEX/CAPEX of the 5G and beyond network, where the combination with software-defined network (SDN) technologies which enables dynamic network construction might be prerequisite. In conclusion, this Special Issue aims to discuss practical issues including PoC/implementation/optimization of future sustainable 5G and beyond networks via the combination of key technologies (e.g. mmWave, MEC, SDN, machine-learning-based optimization, etc.).

References:

Gia Khanh Tran, Ricardo Santos, Hiroaki Ogawa, Makoto Nakamura, Kei Sakaguchi, Andreas Kassler, “Context-Based Dynamic Meshed Backhaul Construction for 5G Heterogeneous Networks,” Special Issue on Trends, Issues and Challenges toward 5G, Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks, MDPI, Sep. 2018.

Gia Khanh Tran, Hiroaki Nishiuchi, Valerio Frascolla, Koji Takinami, Antonio De Domenico, Emilio Calvanese Strinati, Thomas Haustein, Kei Sakaguchi, Sergio Barbarossa, Sergio Barberis, Katsuo Yunoki, “Architecture of mmWave edge cloud in 5G-MiEdge,” IEEE ICC2018, May. 2018.

Assoc. Prof. Gia Khanh Tran
Guest Editor

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• 5G and beyond
• mmWave
• MEC
• SDN
• V2X
• UAV
• backhaul
• implementation
• PoC
• experiment
• optimization