Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

I Welcome you to the third issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2020. This issue includes 20 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless, Optical, and Sensor Communications,” “IoT and M2M,” “Network Security,” and “Internet Technologies.” A brief account for each of these papers is given

An expansion of services and unprecedented traffic growth is anticipated in future networks, aligned with the adoption of the long-awaited Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile communications. To support this demand, without exposing mobile operators to the pressure of CAPEX and OPEX, 5G uses new frequency bands, and adopts promising trends, including: densification, softwarization, and autonomous management

Regardless of the context to which it is applied, sharing resources is well-recognized for its considerable benefits. Since 5G networks will be service-oriented, on-demand, and highly heterogeneous, it is utmost important to approach the design and optimization of the network from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, in order to ensure end-to-end performance, this approach has to entail both wireless

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

I welcome you to the second issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2020. This issue includes 20 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless and Optical Communications,” “Vehicular Communications,” “IoT and M2M,” “Network Security,” and “Internet Technologies.” A brief account for each of these

Millions of sensors continuously produce and transmit data to control real-world infrastructures using complex networks in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT devices are limited in computational power, including storage, processing, and communication resources, to effectively perform compute-intensive tasks locally. Edge computing resolves the resource limitation problems by bringing computation

Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) is one of the main three focus areas in the 5th generation (5G) of wireless communications technologies to enable connectivity of a massive number of Internet of things (IoT) devices with little or no human intervention. In conventional human-type communications (HTC), due to the limited number of available channel resources and orthogonal resource allocation

In recent years, the usage model of the Internet has changed, pushing researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task: (i)

Given the increasing number of space-related applications, research in the emerging space industry is becoming more and more attractive. One compelling area of current space research is the design of miniaturized satellites, known as CubeSats, which are enticing because of their numerous applications and low design-and-deployment cost. The new paradigm of connected space through CubeSats makes possible

The deviation of continuous and discrete complex random variables from the traditional proper and symmetric assumption to a generalized improper and asymmetric characterization (accounting correlation between a random entity and its complex conjugate), respectively, introduces new design freedom and various potential merits. As such, the theory of impropriety has vast applications in medicine, geology

Blockchain technology has been deemed to be an ideal choice for strengthening existing computing systems in varied manners. As one of the network-enabled technologies, cloud computing has been broadly adopted in the industry through numerous cloud service models. Fusing blockchain technology with existing cloud systems has a great potential in both functionality/performance enhancement and security/privacy

Network flows build the basis of modern network data analysis by aggregating properties of network packets with common characteristics. A consistent and unambiguous definition of the network flow concept is an indispensable prerequisite and starting point for reproducible network research. However, in today’s practice, the flow output of distinct flow exporters, which is software to generate flows

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.

I welcome you to the first issue of the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS AND TUTORIALS in 2020. This issue includes 25 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless and Cellular Communications,” “5G Communications,” “Vehicular and Sensor Communications,” “IoT and M2M,” “SDN and NFV,” “Internet Technologies,” and “Network

This paper elaborates on the design challenges, opportunities, and solutions for New Radio-based access to Unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) by taking into account the beam-based transmissions and the worldwide regulatory requirements. NR-U intends to expand the applicability of 5th generation New Radio access technology to support operation in unlicensed bands by adhering to Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) requirements

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is considered an essential future service for the implementation of 5G networks and the Internet of Things, as it is the best method of delivering computation and communication resources to mobile devices. It is based on the connection of the users to servers located on the edge of the network, which is especially relevant for real-time applications that demand minimal latency

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising Internet architecture paradigm of the future that adopts the Content Centric Networking (CCN) approach. Applications and users only care about the contents, while the Internet protocol (i.e., TCP/IP) focuses on communication by specifying and discovering the device location, which makes it more difficult and limiting. NDN supports the efficient distribution

Since their inception in 2008, polar codes have been shown to offer near-capacity error correction performance across a wide range of block lengths and coding rates. Owing to this, polar codes have been selected to provide channel coding in the control channels of Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) New Radio (NR). The operation of the 3GPP NR polar codes is specified in the 3GPP standard TS

Arikan’s polar codes are capable of approaching Shannon’s capacity at a low encoding and decoding complexity, while conveniently supporting rate adaptation. By virtue of these attractive features, polar codes have found their way into the 5G New Radio (NR). Hence, in this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of polar codes, highlighting the major milestones achieved in the last decade. Furthermore

Emerging applications such as wireless industrial control or vehicular communications pose strict requirements in terms of latency and reliability on wireless communication systems. Since contemporary communication standards are not able to fulfill all of these requirements, reliable low-latency communication is an important research topic. Using multiple communication paths at once, i.e., multi-connectivity

With the continuous development of mobile communication technologies, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has proposed related standards with the fifth generation mobile communication technology (5G), which marks the official start of the evolution from the current Long Term Evolution (LTE) system to the next generation mobile communication system (5GS). This paper makes a large number of contributions

Security has become the primary concern in many telecommunications industries today as risks can have high consequences. Especially, as the core and enable technologies will be associated with 5G network, the confidential information will move at all layers in future wireless systems. Several incidents revealed that the hazard encountered by an infected wireless network, not only affects the security

Intentional interference in satellite navigation is becoming an increasing threat for modern systems relying on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). In particular, critical applications such as aviation can be severely affected by un-detected and un-mitigated interference and therefore interference management solutions are crucial to be employed. Methods to cope with such intentional interference

This survey studies the potential data link candidates for unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). There has been tremendous growth in different applications of UAVs such as lifesaving and rescue missions, commercial use, recreations, etc. Unlike the traditional wireless communications, the data links for these systems do not have any general standardized framework yet to ensure safe co-existence of UAVs

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today’s Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, named data networking (NDN) is one of the recent

Facing the gradual ageing society, elderly people living independently are in need of serious attention. In order to assist them to live in a safer environment, the increasing cost of nursing care and the shortage of health-care workers urges the demand of home-based assisted living in recent times. Therefore, home-based health-care has become an active research domain, particularly the abnormal activities

Wireless networks have been widely deployed for many Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, like smart cities and precision agriculture. Low Power Wide Area Networking (LPWAN) is an emerging IoT networking paradigm to meet three key requirements of IoT applications, i.e., low cost, large scale deployment and high energy efficiency. Among all available LPWAN technologies, LoRa networking has attracted

It is the overriding trend of the present-day world that traditional systems and mobile devices are currently transforming into intelligent systems and smart devices. Against this backdrop, cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) emerge as the times require. To achieve the parallel interactions between the human world and the computer network, IoT along with wireless mobile communication

The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained machine-type communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type

In recent years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a pivotal element not only in data-centers and wide-area networks, but also in next generation networking architectures such as Vehicular ad hoc network and 5G. SDN is characterized by decoupled data and control planes, and logically centralized control plane. The centralized control plane in SDN offers several opportunities as well

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has received considerable attention in the past few years, both from industry and academia, due to its potential for reducing capital and operational expenditures, thus enabling faster innovation in networks. NFV proposes decoupling network functions from fixed hardware platforms and implementing them as virtual machines on off-the-shelf servers. Although potentially

The highly demanding Over-The-Top (OTT) multimedia applications pose increased challenges to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for assuring a reasonable Quality of Experience (QoE) to their customers due to lack of flexibility, agility and scalability in traditional networks. The future networks are shifting towards the cloudification of the network resources via Software Defined Networks (SDN) and

Demands for indoor positioning based services (IPS) in commercial and military fields have spurred many positioning systems and techniques. Complex electromagnetic environments (CEEs) may, however, degenerate the accuracy and robustness of some existing single systems and techniques. To overcome this drawback, fusion-based positioning of multiple systems and/or techniques have been proposed to revamp

The IETF IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE802.15.4e (6TiSCH) working group has standardized a set of protocols to enable low power industrial-grade IPv6 networks. 6TiSCH proposes a protocol stack rooted in the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of the IEEE802.15.4-2015 standard, supports multi-hop topologies with the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) routing protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation.

Recent research has shown that the integrity of sensor measurements can be violated through out-of-band signal injection attacks. These attacks target the conversion process from a physical quantity to an analog property—a process that fundamentally cannot be authenticated. Out-of-band signal injection attacks thus pose previously-unexplored security risks by exploiting hardware imperfections in the

Phishing and spear phishing are typical examples of masquerade attacks since trust is built up through impersonation for the attack to succeed. Given the prevalence of these attacks, considerable research has been conducted on these problems along multiple dimensions. We reexamine the existing research on phishing and spear phishing from the perspective of the unique needs of the security domain, which

Reactive defense mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, have made significant efforts to secure a system or network for the last several decades. However, the nature of reactive security mechanisms has limitations because potential attackers cannot be prevented in advance. We are facing a reality with the proliferation of persistent, advanced, intelligent attacks while defenders are often

Modern cyber physical systems (CPSs) has widely being used in our daily lives because of development of information and communication technologies (ICT). With the provision of CPSs, the security and privacy threats associated to these systems are also increasing. Passive attacks are being used by intruders to get access to private information of CPSs. In order to make CPSs data more secure, certain

The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates billions of smart devices that can communicate with one another with minimal human intervention. IoT is one of the fastest developing fields in the history of computing, with an estimated 50 billion devices by the end of 2020. However, the crosscutting nature of IoT systems and the multidisciplinary components involved in the deployment of such systems have introduced

Due to the dramatic increase in high data rate services and in order to meet the demands of the fifth-generation (5G) networks, researchers from both academia and industry are exploring advanced transmission techniques, new network architectures and new frequency spectrum such as the visible light and the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectra. Visible light communication (VLC) particularly is an emerging

The Internet of Things (IoT) extends the Internet connectivity into billions of IoT devices around the world, where the IoT devices collect and share information to reflect status of the physical world. The Autonomous Control System (ACS), on the other hand, performs control functions on the physical systems without external intervention over an extended period of time. The integration of IoT and ACS

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are the underlying monitoring and control components of critical infrastructures, such as power, telecommunication, transportation, pipelines, chemicals and manufacturing plants. Legacy SCADA systems operated on isolated networks, that made them less exposed to Internet threats. However, the increasing connection of SCADA systems to the Internet

The future Internet of Things (IoT) will have a deep economical, commercial and social impact on our lives. The participating nodes in IoT networks are usually resource-constrained, which makes them luring targets for cyber attacks. In this regard, extensive efforts have been made to address the security and privacy issues in IoT networks primarily through traditional cryptographic approaches. However

In recent years, mobile devices are equipped with increasingly advanced sensing and computing capabilities. Coupled with advancements in Deep Learning (DL), this opens up countless possibilities for meaningful applications, e.g., for medical purposes and in vehicular networks. Traditional cloud-based Machine Learning (ML) approaches require the data to be centralized in a cloud server or data center

Network defenses based on traditional tools, techniques, and procedures (TTP) fail to account for the attacker’s inherent advantage present due to the static nature of network services and configurations. To take away this asymmetric advantage, Moving Target Defense (MTD) continuously shifts the configuration of the underlying system, in turn reducing the success rate of cyberattacks. In this survey

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is attracting considerable interest in academic research, commercial, and military applications. Multi-UAV systems organized in an ad hoc fashion called a flying ad hoc network (FANET) can cooperatively and collaboratively accomplish complex missions more efficiently compared to single large UAV systems. However, the unique features of FANETs such as high

The connected vehicle paradigm empowers vehicles with the capability to communicate with neighboring vehicles and infrastructure, shifting the role of vehicles from a transportation tool to an intelligent service platform. Meanwhile, the transportation electrification pushes forward the electric vehicle (EV) commercialization to reduce the greenhouse gas emission by petroleum combustion. The unstoppable

Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless

The inevitable next era of smart living requires unprecedented advances in enabling technologies. The building blocks of this era are devices such as sensors, actuators, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Machine-Type Communication (MTC), also known as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, constitutes the main enabling technology to support communications among such devices. The massive number

In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic constructs, 2) the distributed architecture of the systems using Blockchain, and 3) the Blockchain application context. To each of those contributing factors, we outline

Since the term first coined in 1999, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant momentum in connecting physical objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communications. By offering the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, IoT becomes an important paradigm that enables a whole new class of applications and services.

Recently, with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, the infrastructures, resources, end devices, and applications in communications and networking systems are becoming much more complex and heterogeneous. In addition, the large volume of data and massive end devices may bring serious security, privacy, services provisioning, and network management challenges. In order

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will form the backbone of future next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS) providing travel comfort, road safety, along with a number of value-added services. Such a transformation—which will be fuelled by concomitant advances in technologies for machine learning (ML) and wireless communications—will enable a future vehicular ecosystem that is

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the advancement of the healthcare industry is immense. The ushering of the Medicine 4.0 has resulted in an increased effort to develop platforms, both at the hardware level as well as the underlying software level. This vision has led to the development of Healthcare IoT (H-IoT) systems. The basic enabling technologies include the communication systems

The fifth-generation mobile initiative, 5G, is a tremendous and collective effort to specify, standardize, design, manufacture, and deploy the next cellular network generation. 5G networks will support demanding services such as enhanced Mobile Broadband, Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications and massive Machine-Type Communications, which will require data rates of tens of Gbps, latencies of

The Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) is used in GSM/UMTS telecommunication technologies for signalling and management of communication. It was designed on the concept of private boundary walled technology having mutual trust between few national/multinational operators with no inherent security controls in 1970s. Deregulation, expansion, and merger of telecommunication technology with data networks have

Ubiquitous sensors and smart devices from factories and communities are generating massive amounts of data, and ever-increasing computing power is driving the core of computation and services from the cloud to the edge of the network. As an important enabler broadly changing people’s lives, from face recognition to ambitious smart factories and cities, developments of artificial intelligence (especially

Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology behind the security and performance of blockchain. From incremental modifications of Nakamoto consensus protocol to innovative alternative consensus mechanisms, many