The 5G Phase-2 and beyond wireless systems will focus more on vertical applications such as autonomous driving and the Industrial Internet of Things, many of which are categorized as uRLLC. In this article, an alternative view of uRLLC is presented, information latency, measuring the distortion of information resulting from time lag of its acquisition process, which is more relevant than conventional

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The articles in this special section provide a comprehensive overview on the recent development of the intelligent radio. The advances in wireless communications have continuously been pushing the limit of radio technologies. Nowadays, radio networks can provide extremely high data rate, ultra-low latency, and high reliability to serve communication needs of sectors that could not be imagined before

In this article, we present a pathway to intelligent radio. After briefly reviewing the CR enabling techniques developed in the past couple of decades, we introduce the recent advances on ML in communications, especially those that can be applied to CR straightforwardly. Then we discuss those AI techniques that have been specifically designed to make spectrum sensing and spectrum access intelligent

5G wireless communication networks are currently being deployed, and B5G networks are expected to be developed over the next decade. AI technologies and, in particular, ML have the potential to efficiently solve the unstructured and seemingly intractable problems by involving large amounts of data that need to be dealt with in B5G. This article studies how AI and ML can be leveraged for the design

Assigning bands of the wireless spectrum as resources to users is a common problem in wireless networks. Typically, frequency bands were assumed to be available in a stable manner. Nevertheless, in recent scenarios where wireless networks may be deployed in unknown environments, spectrum competition is considered, making it uncertain whether a frequency band is available at all or at what quality.

License-assisted access (LAA) to unlicensed spectrum is a potential solution to improve the resource availability and system scalability of 5G/ B5G networks. Challenges arise from coexistence between LAA and incumbent systems, especially the ubiquitous IEEE 802.11 WiFi systems. This article demonstrates that the coexistence can be substantially improved by leveraging learning-based clustering of small

The explosive growth of wireless devices and data rate demands makes spectrum scarcity a serious problem. A promising solution is to employ OSA, which enables SUs to seek and opportunistically exploit the underutilized spectrum without interrupting the data transmission of PUs. However, the real-world implementation of OSA still faces several critical challenges including lack of global information

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Spectrum sensing, which helps to resolve the coexistence issue and optimize spectrum efficiency, plays an important role in future wireless communication systems. However, the upcoming 5G communication involves diversified scenarios with different characteristics and diverse requirements. This tendency makes it difficult for spectrum sensing methods to flexibly serve various applications while maintaining

Integrated satellite-terrestrial networks (ISTNs) toward beyond fifth-generation (B5G) wireless systems benefiting from both satellite and terrestrial systems can achieve all-time seamless and broad coverage. Considering the scarcity of frequency resources and intense satellite-terrestrial cochannel interference, intelligent resource allocation with high spectrum efficiency and low co-channel interference

Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that learns the high-level abstraction of data in a layered structure. Since its invention, it has been successfully applied in many image and speech processing applications. The success of deep learning depends on how big the data size is. Recently, the number of smart sensors and the Internet of Things have increased exponentially. This, in turn, has

Beamforming is evidently a core technology in recent generations of mobile communication networks. Nevertheless, an iterative process is typically required to optimize the parameters, making it ill-placed for real-time implementation due to high complexity and computational delay. Heuristic solutions such as zero-forcing are simpler but at the expense of performance loss. Alternatively, DL is well

The upcoming Internet of Things and fifth generation communications are expected to support short package transmissions with low complexity and low energy consumption, which motivates applications of noncoherent communications. First, we review the design methods for noncoherent communications based on two statistical schemes, that is, maximum likelihood (ML) decoding and energy-based decoding, which

5G wireless network technology will not only significantly increase bandwidth but also introduce new features such as mMTC and URLLC. However, high request latency will remain a challenging problem even with 5G due to the massive requests generated by an increasing number of devices that require long travel distances to the services deployed in cloud centers. By pushing the services closer to the edge

In this work, we propose a new deep imitation learning (DIL)-driven edge-cloud computation offloading framework for MEC networks. A key objective for the framework is to minimize the offloading cost in time-varying network environments through optimal behavioral cloning. Specifically, we first introduce our computation offloading model for MEC in detail. Then we make fine-grained offloading decisions

Caching content on mobile devices reduces not only the transmission of backhaul links but also the latency of content acquisition. However, in the existing caching schemes, the joint effect of the caching-aware indicator of users and content dimensions on the caching strategy is not considered. Thus, how to learn fine-grained caching- aware indicators and design caching schemes are still challenging

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be powerful Internet of Things components to execute sensing tasks over the next-generation cellular networks, which are generally referred to as the cellular Internet of UAVs. However, due to the high mobility of UAVs and shadowing in airto- ground channels, UAVs operate in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Therefore, UAVs need to improve the quality of service

MmWave communication suffers from severe path loss due to high frequency and is sensitive to blockages because of high penetration loss, especially in mobile communication scenarios. It highly depends on line-of-sight channels and narrow beams, and thus efficient beam tracking and beam alignment are necessary techniques to maintain robust communication links, in which tracking user mobility lays the

Radio FD has emerged as an attractive technique capable of doubling the spectral efficiency over half duplex. However, for signal reception, an FD node needs to suppress its transmitter's signals quite significantly. In point to point communication systems, these transmitter signals are termed self-interference. When working with an FD mobile network, the self-interference problem becomes much more

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication networks are promising in the fifth and beyond wireless communication systems. In this paper, we shed light on three UAV-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) architectures. Those architectures have been receiving ever increasing research attention for improving computation performance and decreasing execution latency by integrating UAV into MEC networks

VLC performs the dual-functions of communication and lighting and will play an important role in next-generation wireless communications. Proper multiple access methods should be identified for VLC in multi-user scenarios. This article proposes a VLC-CDMA system using OCCs, which are unipolar codes with a multiple sub-codes structure. OCCs offer good autocorrelation and cross-correlation functions

The practical development of WUSN would benefit numerous applications, including online infrastructure monitoring, earthquake warning systems, and agricultural automation. However, stateof- the-art RF electromagnetic wireless systems are ineffective for communicating through-soil, due to extreme signal path losses from absorption and scattering in soil, even though the typical data requirements for

IoT provides ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive intelligence. Challenges arise from the data-intensive applications pertaining to IoT. The major contribution of this article is a new asymptotically optimal, fully decentralized, real-time framework which seamlessly integrates wireless computation offloading and fog computing in IoT networks with random traffic variations over space and time. Other

With the explosive growth of data traffic over wireless access networks, the use of the millimeter- wave band becomes inevitable due to the spectrum scarcity in lower frequencies and the availability of large chunks of underutilized spectrum in this band. The rapid evolution of wireless technologies and co-existence of legacy and emerging wireless infrastructures are leading to complex network operation

Space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) is envisioned as a promising solution to provide cost-effective, large-scale, and flexible wireless coverage and communication services. Since realworld deployment for testing of SAGIN is difficult and prohibitive, an efficient SAGIN simulation platform is requisite. In this article, we present our developed SAGIN simulation platform which supports various

The primary objective of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks is to save approximately a million lives every year by augmenting the existing safety functions of our vehicles. This article reviews the characteristics required in order to fulfil this promise. A critical assessment highlights the strengths and weaknesses of Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC), Long Term Evolution (LTE), 5G and Visible

Owing to the eminent performance gain, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been regarded as a promising approach to achieve high throughput and low latency for the next-generation networks. Nevertheless, potential adversaries can still pose a threat to secure transmission in NOMA systems. Hence, in this article, secure transmission schemes based on beamforming optimization are designed to combat

Broadband satellite services, such as satellite- based Internet of Things and cloud services, have attracted much attention recently. To achieve the goal of anytime and anywhere high-speed satellite communications, there is a big demand for satellite spectrum. The push for improving spectrum efficiency in satellite systems has been an important issue, mainly from the perspectives of spectrum reuse

LPWANs have recently emerged as a promising solution for enabling industrial IoT applications. To fully exploit their potential, LPWANs need to be connected to the Internet. However, the severe capacity constraints of LPWAN technologies challenge IPv6 support, and even 6LoWPAN-based adaptations are not sufficient. In this paper, we present Static Context Header Compression and Fragmentation (SCHC)

The new demands for high-reliability and ultra-high capacity wireless communication have led to extensive research into 5G communications. However, current communication systems, which were designed on the basis of conventional communication theories, significantly restrict further performance improvements and lead to severe limitations. Recently, the emerging deep learning techniques have been recognized

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High mobility in ITS, especially V2V communication networks, allows increasing coverage and quick assistance to users and neighboring networks, but also degrades the performance of the entire system due to fluctuation in the wireless channel. How to obtain better QoS during multimedia transmission in V2V over future generation networks (i.e., edge computing platforms) is very challenging due to the

With the explosive growth of vehicles, traffic monitoring has garnered significant attention in recent years. Collecting vehicular speed is an effective way to monitor traffic conditions and help vehicles to find optimal routes. However, further progress may be impeded due to users' privacy concerns. In addition, traffic monitoring is more difficult in a self-organizing VANET, since there is no centralized

In recent years, the emerging framework of the Internet of Things has been leading the technological landscape in a number of different fields and applications, from autonomous and connected vehicles to wearable devices. The healthcare system is benefiting from this continuously evolving environment since it leverages the opportunities offered by the ubiquitous and pervasive presence of connected objects

The ubiquitous nature of a connected health system imposes challenges with regard to the design of system architecture, security, and privacy. Different from traditional centralized systems, a distributed blockchain-based security protection architecture is proposed. In particular, smart contracts, as an intelligent protocol in the blockchain technology, are exploited to automatically achieve system

In mobile access networks, different types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices (e.g., sensor nodes and smartphones) generate vast traffic demands, thus dramatically increasing the traffic loads of their connected access nodes, especially in the 5G era. Considering the possible traffic congestion of the access nodes, drone base stations (DBSs) can be flexibly deployed to hotspot areas as relays between

The detection of vehicle presence in parking slots is a fundamental part of smart parking systems. The problem is commonly approached with devices composed of specific sensors, which usually are either magnetic or infrared. The sensor is continuously sampled by an onboard microcontroller capable of determining the slot status (available or occupied) and sending the information to a central collection

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have gained interest because of their applicability and significance in the fields of traffic management, road monitoring and safety, infotainment, and on-demand services. Route planning in vehicular networks based on efficient collection of real-time data can effectively mitigate traffic congestion problems in urban areas. Furthermore, real-time data is shared by

The arrival of the IoT era has been revolutionizing various fields of our current world. Precision agriculture is recognized as one sustainable, eco-friendly, and profitable mode to improve agriculture yields and quality, and will ultimately come true with the further implementation of IoT techniques in agriculture. To facilitate the implementation, we make a visualization review of the agriculture

IoT has revolutionized the modern way of life with the advent of intelligent systems. The traditional network architecture employed in the IoT domain is unable to define sufficient solutions of these challenges for a cost-effective and seamless workflow. The intelligent IoT system ensures scalability in challenging or hostile environments. With the emergence of the SDN domain offering programming ability

The rapid advancement of the Internet of Things is expected to play a critical role in future intelligent transportation systems. This technology utilizes advanced information and communication technologies to enhance the operational capabilities of the vehicles and is often referred to as IoAV. More importantly, the increasing usage of sensors and other technologies generates vast amounts of data

Intelligent vehicular wireless networks and services have witnessed great advancements in both technology and management capabilities. Vehicular networks commenced as simple ad hoc networks with node-to-node communication capabilities. Today, vehicular networks not only provide sophisticated vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but also make use of state-of-the-art cloud and fog computing frameworks to

As an emerging communication platform in the Internet of Things, IoV is promising to pave the way for the establishment of smart cities and provide support for various kinds of applications and services. Energy management in IoV has been attracting an upsurge of interest in both academia and industry. Currently, green IoV mainly focuses on two aspects: energy management of battery- enabled RSUs and

The IoT network allows IoT devices to communicate with other devices, applications, and services by exploiting existing network infrastructure. Recently, a promising paradigm, MEC, emerging for alleviating high latency data services in cloud computing framework plays an important role in the IoT network. Network performance and intelligence can be improved by integrating cognitive and cooperative mechanisms

For large UAV networks, timely communication is needed to accomplish a series of missions accurately and effectively. The relay technology will play an important role in UAV networks by helping drones communicate with long-distance drones, which solves the problem of the limited transmission power of drones. In this article, relay selection is seen as the entry point to improve the performance of self-organizing

With the fast development of IoE and its applications, the ever increasing mobile Internet traffic and services bring unprecedented challenges, including scalability, mobility, availability, and security, which cannot be addressed by the current clean-slate network architecture. In this article, a cybertwin based next generation network architecture is proposed to accommodate the evolution from end-to-end

Ultra-dense SCNs have been regarded as a promising technology to handle the future data traffic explosion. However, the complicated relationships among large scale users and cells practically demand a cooperative grouping mechanism to account for the shortage of resources in SCNs. A group buying market mechanism provides a win-win situation and effective resource allocation in the view of economics

The throughput of the next-generation wireless network (WN) should be significantly improved to satisfy the explosive growth of the variety of applications and the amount of data traffic. Various technologies such as OFDMA, NOMA, cooperative multi-point, and so on, have been proposed to improve the throughput of WN. The existing technologies can improve the performance of user throughput in WN via

The emerging 5G communication network is gaining tremendous attention from mobile network operators, regulators, and academia due to the provisions of network densification, ultra-low latency and improved spectral and energy efficiencies. However, post-disaster EMS, which nowadays predominantly depends on the wireless communication infrastructure, is significantly lagging behind in terms of innovation

UAVs are expected to be an important complementary component for 5G (and beyond) communication systems to achieve the goal of global access to the Internet for all. To fully exploit the benefits of the distinct features of various UAVs, this article proposes a novel hierarchical network architecture enabled by software defined networking, which integrates cross-layer high and low altitude platforms

Drones are being increasingly used to create new services and support the expansion of existing applications based on communication networks due to their flexibility and potential coverage. However, drone control and safety guarantees are difficult to attain, especially when drones fly beyond visual line of sight. To address this problem, we consider the real-time location awareness of drones flying

Licensed spectrum sharing (LSS) is an emerging scheme to improve spectrum efficiency by authorizing certain secondary spectrum licensees (SSLs) to share spectra with the primary spectrum licensees (PSLs). Spectrum trading is an effective way to implement LSS by offering incentives for PSLs to open their spectra. Although many research efforts have been devoted to such an economic-based scheme, most

We study data transfer links that would enable development of low-cost technologies for increasing safety of general aviation (GA). The solution proposed here is to supplement the existing cmWave solutions with mmWave cellular signals in order to better handle interferences and to reach lower outage probabilities and higher throughputs. Moreover, cellular solutions have the advantage of re-using existing