Special Issue of Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies (ETT)

Enabling 5G: Energy and Spectrally Efficient Communication Systems

Current estimates predict that, by 2020, there will be 50 billion devices connected to Internet. As a result of the generated data traffic, the network load will be increased by three orders of magnitude compared to what operators are experiencing today. Such unprecedented burden of data delivery poses, essentially, two challenges that will need to be addressed by 5G technology. First, the coexistence of this unbelievably high number of devices requires an efficient approach to the spectrum use to overcome the, otherwise unavoidable, “spectrum crunch”. Second, the energy consumption needed to sustain such pervasive network infrastructure and wireless devices must be kept at a minimum to achieve environmental sustainability through Green communications.

Such stringent requirements on the use of spectrum and energy open a wide research area for future 5G communication technology, that can impinge on a plethora of aspects related to communication systems: from lay-out optimization at component level to large-scale network architecture designs. In this sense, viable solutions will impact both future commercial activities as well as standardization approaches.

In light of the above, the main purpose of this special issue is to promote novel approaches in analyzing, designing and optimizing energy and spectrum constrained 5G communication systems focusing on the network, link and physical layer aspects. Topics include but are not limited to:

- Physical layer solutions (e.g. large-scale MIMO, interference management, mmWave)
- Link layer (e.g. dynamic spectrum access, SON-enabled RRM, smart link adaptation)
- Network layer (e.g. packet core designs, network virtualization, information-centric protocols, wireless mesh backhaul)
- Architecture design (e.g. software-defined networks, scalable wireless access, HetNets, multi-cell cooperation, cloud-RAN)
- Technologies (e.g. P2P backhauling, joint access/backhaul, device-to-device (both for unlicensed and licensed spectrum))
- Enablers (e.g. self-organizing networking principles)

Papers must be tailored to the problems related to 5G communication systems and explicitly consider energy and spectrally efficient techniques and algorithms. The editors maintain the right to reject papers they deem to be out of scope of this special issue. Only originally unpublished contributions and invited articles will be considered for the issue. The papers should be formatted according to the ETT guidelines
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1541-8251/homepage/ForAuthors.html. Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript via ManuscriptCentral (which can be found at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ett) according to the timetable below.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: February 1st, 2014
Author Notification: June 14th, 2014
Final Manuscript: July 31st, 2014
Publication: Q4, 2014

Guest Editors:

Rahim Tafazolli - Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey, UK (r.tafazolli@surrey.ac.uk)
Sergio Palazzo - University of Catania, Italy (palazzo@diit.unict.it)
Miquel Payaró - Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Spain (miquel.payaro@cttc.es)
Robert W. Heath Jr. - The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA (rheath@utexas.edu)