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

We welcome you to the first issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2021. This issue includes 20 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications,” “Vehicular and Sensor Communications,” “Network Virtualization,” “Network Security,” “Multimedia Communications,” “IoT and M2M,” and

This survey paper focuses on modulation aspects of molecular communication, an emerging field focused on building biologically-inspired systems that embed data within chemical signals. The primary challenges in designing these systems are how to encode and modulate information onto chemical signals, and how to design a receiver that can detect and decode the information from the corrupted chemical

Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is currently a hot research field in academia and industry with many underwater applications, such as ocean monitoring, seismic monitoring, environment monitoring, and seabed exploration. However, UWSNs suffer from various limitations and challenges: high ocean interference and noise, high propagation delay, narrow bandwidth, dynamic network topology, and limited

Today’s emerging needs (Internet of Things applications, Network Function Virtualization services, Mobile Edge computing, etc.) are challenging the classic approach of deploying a few large data centers to provide cloud services. A massively distributed Cloud-Edge architecture could better fit these new trends’ requirements and constraints by deploying on-demand infrastructure services in Point-of-Presences

In recent years, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) came into being. IIoT connects sensors, industrial equipment, products, and staff in the factory, enabling context-awareness and industrial equipment automate control. The identity resolution system is a core infrastructure in IIoT. Similar to the role of Domain Name System (DNS) on the Internet, it is the entrance to the IIoT. The difference

Authentication is an important issue in wireless communications because the open nature of the wireless medium provides more security vulnerabilities. Recently, Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) attracts many research interests because it provides information-theory security and low complexity. Although many researchers focus on the PLA and exploit its potential in enhancing wireless security, the

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

I Welcome you to the fourth issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2020. This issue includes 22 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications,” “5G and Vehicular Communications,” “Internet of Things,” “Network Security,” and “Miscellaneous.” There are three papers in the miscellaneous

The increasing number of heterogeneous devices connected to the Internet, together with tight 5G requirements have generated new challenges for designing network infrastructures. Industrial verticals such as automotive, smart city and eHealthcare (among others) need secure, low latency and reliable communications. To meet these stringent requirements, computing resources have to be moved closer to

Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g., huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being

Future wireless networks will provide high-bandwidth, low-latency, and ultra-reliable Internet connectivity to meet the requirements of different applications, ranging from virtual reality to the Internet of Things. To this aim, edge caching, computing, and communication (edge-C3) have emerged to bring network resources (i.e., bandwidth, storage, and computing) closer to end users. Edge-C3 improves

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by their ability to integrate the physical and information or cyber worlds. Their deployment in critical infrastructure have demonstrated a potential to transform the world. However, harnessing this potential is limited by their critical nature and the far reaching effects of cyber attacks on human, infrastructure and the environment. An attraction for

Visible Light Communications (VLC) is becoming a mature communication technology, particularly for indoor usage. The application in outdoor environments is especially interesting in the scope of Vehicular VLC (V-VLC), however, there are some critical challenges remaining. In general, VLC is a good complement to Radio Frequency (RF)-based communication. For automotive use cases, V-VLC can benefit from

Building on the ubiquity of electric power infrastructure, power line communications (PLC) has been successfully used in diverse application scenarios, including the smart grid and in-home broadband communications systems as well as industrial and home automation. However, the power line channel exhibits deleterious properties, one of which is its hostile noise environment. This article aims for providing

Blockchains are distributed systems, in which security is a critical factor for their success. However, despite their increasing popularity and adoption, there is a lack of standardized models that study blockchain-related security threats. To fill this gap, the main focus of our work is to systematize and extend the knowledge about the security and privacy aspects of blockchains and contribute to

A wide variety of works have been conducted in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to enable a variety of applications for road safety, traffic efficiency and passenger infotainment. Although dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) based V2X is already in the deployment phase, cellular based V2X is gaining more interest in academia and industry most recently. This article surveys the existing

The unprecedented increase in the demand for mobile data, fuelled by new emerging applications and use-cases such as high-definition video streaming and heightened online activities has caused massive strain on the existing cellular networks. As a solution, the fifth generation (5G) of cellular technology has been introduced to improve network performance through various innovative features such as

Satellite communications (SatComs) have recently entered a period of renewed interest motivated by technological advances and nurtured through private investment and ventures. The present survey aims at capturing the state of the art in SatComs, while highlighting the most promising open research topics. Firstly, the main innovation drivers are motivated, such as new constellation types, on-board processing

The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communications and allow skill set delivery

Recent years have seen rapid deployment of mobile computing and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which can be mostly attributed to the increasing communication and sensing capabilities of wireless systems. Big data analysis, pervasive computing, and eventually artificial intelligence (AI) are envisaged to be deployed on top of the IoT and create a new world featured by data-driven AI. In this context

Networked microgrids (NMGs) provide a promising solution for accommodating various distributed energy resources (DERs) and enhancing the system performance in terms of reliability, resilience, flexibility, and energy efficiency. With the penetration of MGs, the communication-based distributed control is playing an increasingly important role in NMGs for coordinating a multitude of heterogeneous and

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the whole of society. It represents the next evolution of the Internet and will significantly improve the ability to gather and analyze data, as well as the ability to control devices remotely. In this respect, the usage of connected devices is continuously growing with the expansion of the applications being offered to individuals and industries. To address

As vehicles playing an increasingly important role in people’s daily life, requirements on safer and more comfortable driving experience have arisen. Connected vehicles (CVs) can provide enabling technologies to realize these requirements and have attracted widespread attentions from both academia and industry. These requirements ask for a well-designed computing architecture to support the Quality-of-Service

The trade-off between more user bandwidth and quality of service requirements introduces unprecedented challenges to the next generation smart optical networks. In this regard, the use of optical performance monitoring (OPM) and modulation format identification (MFI) techniques becomes a common need to enable the development of next-generation autonomous optical networks, with ultra-low latency and

The blockchain technology is taking the world by storm. Blockchain with its decentralized, transparent and secure nature has emerged as a disruptive technology for the next generation of numerous industrial applications. One of them is Cloud of Things enabled by the combination of cloud computing and Internet of Things. In this context, blockchain provides innovative solutions to address challenges

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

Terahertz communication is emerging as a future technology to support Terabits per second link with highlighting features as high throughput and negligible latency. However, the unique features of the Terahertz band such as high path loss, scattering, and reflection pose new challenges and results in short communication distance. The antenna directionality, in turn, is required to enhance the communication

The recent advancements in hardware miniaturization capabilities have boosted the diffusion of systems based on Energy Harvesting (EH) technologies, as a means to power embedded wireless devices in a sustainable and low-cost fashion. Despite the undeniable management advantages, the intermittent availability of the energy source and the limited power supply has led to challenging system trade-offs

This paper presents a maritime machine-type communication (MTC) concept dedicated to the maritime Internet of Things (IoT). It first outlines the unique maritime MTC requirements on the ubiquity, continuity, heterogeneity, simplicity, interoperability, and scalability for maritime IoT applications and services. It then addresses these requirements through a concrete maritime MTC system design, based

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, location-based services have been widely applied in the construction of smart cities. Satellite-based location services have been utilized in outdoor environments, but they are not suitable for indoor technology due to the absence of global positioning system (GPS) signal. Therefore, many indoor localization technologies and systems

The ambitious high data-rate applications in the envisioned future beyond fifth-generation (B5G) wireless networks require new solutions, including the advent of more advanced architectures than the ones already used in 5G networks, and the coalition of different communications schemes and technologies to enable these applications requirements. Among the candidate communications schemes for future

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is an improvement from conventional cloud computing to new revolutionized computing services including intelligent transportation, autonomous driving and vehicle control, Internet browsing, online documentation, and infotainment. It enables vehicles to autonomously share heterogeneous computational resources while solving unanticipated critical problems dynamically.

With the emergence of 4k/8k video, the throughput requirement of video delivery will keep grow to tens of Gbps. Other new high-throughput and low-latency video applications including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and online gaming, are also proliferating. Due to the related stringent requirements, supporting these applications over wireless local area network (WLAN) is far beyond the

The rapid-developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, fast-growing network traffic, and emerging intelligent applications (e.g., autonomous driving, virtual reality, etc.) urgently require a new, faster, more reliable and flexible network form. At this time, researchers in both industry and academia have turned their attention to the sixth generation (6G) communication networks. In the 6G vision

A key application of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm lies within industrial contexts. Indeed, the emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), commonly referred to as Industry 4.0, promises to revolutionize production and manufacturing through the use of large numbers of networked embedded sensing devices, and the combination of emerging computing technologies, such as Fog/Cloud Computing and

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a crucial research field spawned by the Internet of Things (IoT). IIoT links all types of industrial equipment through the network; establishes data acquisition, exchange, and analysis systems; and optimizes processes and services, so as to reduce cost and enhance productivity. The introduction of edge computing in IIoT can significantly reduce the decision-making

Dynamic time division duplex (D-TDD) dynamically allocates the transmission directions for traffic adaptation in each cell. D-TDD systems are receiving a lot of attention because they can reduce latency and increase spectrum utilization via flexible and dynamic duplex operation in 5G New Radio (NR). However, the advantages of the D-TDD system are difficult to fully utilize due to the cross-link interference

In recent years, the booming of Internet of Things (IoT) has populated the world with billions of smart devices that implement novel services and applications. The potential for cyberattacks on IoT systems have called for new solutions from the research community. Remote attestation is a widely used technique that allows a verifier to identify software compromise on a remote platform (called prover)

Synthetic molecular communication (MC) is a new communication engineering paradigm which is expected to enable revolutionary applications such as smart drug delivery and real-time health monitoring. The design and implementation of synthetic MC systems (MCSs) at nano- and microscale is very challenging. This is particularly true for synthetic MCSs employing biological components as transmitters and

Wireless data traffic is growing unprecedentedly and it may impede network performance by consuming an ever-greater amount of bandwidth. With the advancement in technology there exist profound techniques having potentials to improve performance of wireless networks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such evolving technology that enables systems to take intelligent decisions. AI can be incorporated

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in a wide range of fields, ranging from speech processing, image classification to drug discovery. This is driven by the explosive growth of data, advances in machine learning (especially deep learning), and the easy access to powerful computing resources. Particularly, the wide scale deployment of edge devices (e.g., IoT devices) generates

Omnidirectional or 360° video is increasingly being used, mostly due to the latest advancements in immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology. However, its wide adoption is hindered by the higher bandwidth and lower latency requirements than associated with traditional video content delivery. Diverse researchers propose and design solutions that help support an immersive visual experience of 360° video

The TCP/IP stack plays an important role in terms of data transmission, traffic control and address assignment in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. However, with the increasing technical requirements and daily demand in IoV, the drawbacks of traditional TCP/IP protocols, e.g., weak scalability in large networks, low efficiency in the dense environment

This paper presents a literature review on recent applications and design aspects of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the future wireless networks. Conventionally, the network optimization has been limited to transmission control at two endpoints, i.e., end users and network controller. The fading wireless channel is uncontrollable and becomes one of the main limiting factors for performance

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