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The primary reason for the selection of this book for this column to review is its unique way of explaining the concepts of electromagnetic theory, which is very often difficult to understand by students, and to apply this theory to antenna design by giving practical examples of antennas used in wireless products from handheld gadgets to smart watches and mobile phones. Thus, this book can help readers

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Welcome to the February issue of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Communications series of IEEE Communications Magazine. The series continues to grow in popularity among academicians, researchers and practitioners who apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to solving problems across diverse domains of networking and communications. With the rapid developments

Although many countries have started the initial phase of rolling out 5G, it is still in its infancy with researchers from both academia and industry facing the challenges of developing it to its full potential. With the support of artificial intelligence, development of digital transformation through the notion of a digital twin has been taking off in many industries such as smart manufacturing, oil

Next-generation autonomous and networked industrial systems (i.e., robots, vehicles, drones) have driven advances in ultra-reliable low-laten-cy communications (URLLC) and computing. These networked multi-agent systems require fast, communication-efficient, and distributed machine learning (ML) to provide mission-crit-ical control functionalities. Distributed ML techniques, including federated learning

This article introduces the application of machine learning (ML)-based procedures in real-world satellite communication operations. While the application of ML in image processing has led to unprecedented advantages in new services and products, the application of ML in wireless systems is still in its infancy. In particular, this article focuses on the introduction of ML-based mechanisms in satellite

Smart railway is in the process of vigorous development based on the advancement of numerous emerging and advanced techniques, such as artificial intelligence and big data. However, a smart railway network is exceedingly time-varying and complicated, which presents great challenges to power allocation. Deep reinforcement learning is capable of effectually improving the intelligence as well as cognition

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Military applications requiring communications and networking are plentiful, and these operations are conducted in challenging environments. Challenges stem from many places, such as by constraints imposed by the presence of active adversaries, limitations resulting from operations with resource-limited assets, and urgency brought forth from strict mission requirements. In this rich area of communications

We present a comprehensive and critical review of dependability techniques applicable across all layers of the military Internet of Things (MIoT). We discuss the main reliability challenges occurring in MIoT, introduce a general approach to fault tolerance, and assess methods relevant for dealing with faults in MIoT.

Today's age of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in urban areas revolves around the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and application of IoT in smart city constructs. IoT has enabled cheap but reliable ubiquitous computing for modern day ICT needs. As a result, the military community is actively looking into application of IoT for its operational needs. Federation and interoperability

Military networks, and especially tactical networks, have become crucial in conducting military actions. With images and videos being rich sources of information, a primary challenge in military networks is to be able to issue a query over a (large) distributed set of devices to find concrete actions or objects of interest. The problem inherent to this scenario is how to gather this information in

Security accreditation is a vital process used by governmental, military, and international organizations to verify a proper security posture of communication and information systems. Currently, it is a largely manual, time consuming, and highly repetitive process. Smart contracts could offer an opportunity to automate some parts of the security review, increasing speed, transparency, and predictability

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Many malicious activities require a large number of IP addresses for altering user identities. It is well known that a large number of IP addresses could be obtained through compromising numerous machines and building botnets. However, we recently found that a special type of off-the-shelf virtual private server (VPS), which we refer to as dynamic VPSs, can retrieve a huge number of IP addresses using

In recent years, radio frequency (RF) sensing has gained increasing popularity due to its pervasiveness, low cost, non-intrusiveness, and privacy preservation. However, realizing the promises of RF sensing is highly nontrivial, given typical challenges such as multipath and interference. One potential solution leverages deep learning to build direct mappings from the RF domain to target domains, hence

Communication networks and the systems they interconnect are going through a phase of tremendous change. The former agnostic delivery of content between endpoints has given way to networks increasingly adding functionality beyond moving data. Softwarization technologies including network function virtualization (NFV) and soft-ware-defined networking (SDN) are key enablers that introduce computing into

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology for enabling cellu-lar-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications in the future. Equipped with full-dimensional large arrays, ground base stations (GBSs) can apply adaptive fine-grained 3D beamforming to mitigate the strong interference between high-altitude UAVs and low-altitude terrestrial users, thus significantly

Network operators are looking toward LTE License Assisted Access (LAA) as a means of extending capacity by offloading traffic to unlicensed bands. However, operation in these bands requires abiding by certain coexistence rules in terms of channel access. The description of these rules in the existing literature is not always in line with the latest standards. Therefore, in this article, we clarify

Autonomous robotic swarms are envisioned for a variety of sensing applications in space exploration, search and rescue, and disaster management. An important capability of a swarm is sensing spatio-temporal processes such as radio wave propagation and seismic activities. The spa-tio-temporal properties of these processes dictate the required sensing position and time accuracy, as well as update rate

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Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

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People pause at the end of each year and look back in contemplation. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit our lives in 2020 and made it a hard to forget year. Today, we are still in the midst of a storm that started over a year ago and may not see beyond its gloom and melancholy. More than 90 million cases and 2 million deaths have been reported worldwide. A second wave of infections and a couple of coronavirus

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It is with sadness we note the recent passing of Norman Abramson, a leading pioneer in wireless networking. He was the leader and inspiration behind the development of ALO-HAnet at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), which became operational in June 1971. ALOHAnet, or simply ALOHA, was the first successful deployment of a wireless data packet network 1 . The principles behind ALOHA had a far reaching

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Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

The increased deployment of robots to automate repetitive, high precision, and difficult tasks is a key enabler for the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Robots and autonomous systems (RAS) provide significant productivity gains by allowing flexible production lines that can be dynamically reconfigured to manufacture highly customized products. However, such flexibility can only be harnessed when RAS are intelligent

Real-world robot networks create hostile radio environments due to their highly dynamic communication topologies and stringent real-time transmission requirements. In this article, we propose improvements to contention-based networks that utilize inter-robot navigation information for safer robot motion control in dense multi-robot settings. Toward this end, we introduce a Crash Risk Prioritization

Driven by their versatility and autonomy, advanced unmanned aerial systems have indicated substantial promise along the development of current communication networks, as well as in support of new communication platforms. The resulting integration of robotic and communication systems brings increased levels of complexity, which cannot be modeled accurately by conventional approaches. An example of this

Autonomous flight for UAVs relies on visual information for avoiding obstacles and ensuring safe collision-free flight. In addition to visual clues, safe UAVs often need connectivity with the ground station. In this article, we study the synergies between vision and communications for edge-computing-enabled UAV flight. By proposing a framework of edge computing assisted autonomous flight (ECAAF), we

Extended reality (XR)-aided teleoperation has shown its potential in improving operating efficiency in mission-critical, information-rich, and complex scenarios. The multi-sensory XR devices introduce several new types of traffic with unique quality of service (QoS) requirements, which are usually defined by three measures: human perception, corresponding sensors, and present devices. To fulfill these

As a key component of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) require enhanced ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, which may not be guaranteed under the first (Release 15) 5G communications standard called New Radio (NR), defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Recently, 3GPP Release 16 NR standardization has been completed

This article presents an overview of current Industry 4.0 applied research topics, addressed from both the industrial production and wireless communication points of view. A roadmap toward achieving the more advanced industrial manufacturing visions and concepts, such as “swarm production” (nonlinear and fully decentralized production) is defined, highlighting relevant industrial use cases, their associated

The impressive advancements in embedded systems and the integration of new types of smart devices into the Internet of Things (IoT) continue to revolutionize the communication technologies. Gradually, such devices are enriched with additional capabilities (e.g., sense, learn, reason, move, act on the environment) beyond classic connectivity services. However, there are no unified and coherent software

In this first 2021 issue, the Mobile Communications and Networks Series welcomes the New Year by bringing to the readers of this magazine a collection of very interesting articles on mainstream topics in wireless communications. The COVID-19 pandemic that battered many parts of the world in the past year imposed health-preserving physical distancing rules that hampered many of our activities. The pandemic

While the deployment of 5G cellular systems will continue well into the next decade, much interest is already being generated toward technologies that will underlie its successor, 6G. Undeniably, 5G will have a transformative impact on the way we live and communicate, but it is still far away from supporting the Internet of Everything, where upward of 1 million devices/km 3 (both terrestrial and aerial)

With vast mmWave spectrum and narrow beam antenna technology, precise position location is now possible in 5G and future mobile communication systems. In this article, we describe how centimeter-level localization accuracy can be achieved, particularly through the use of map-based techniques. We show how data fusion of parallel information streams, machine learning, and cooperative localization techniques

In the future, connected vehicles and automated factories will increasingly use wireless communication. Because the cost of communication failures in these applications is high, the wireless networks must be reliable and continuously monitored. To address this need, we propose a general approach to determine the reliability of wireless networks and describe implementations of it. Our approach focuses

5G wireless has ushered in new promises of improved performance and ubiquitous connectivity. However, a continuous increase in connected devices and the proliferation of the Internet of Things have already created skepticism about the capacity of 5G wireless to satisfy the huge data requirements across a myriad of devices. This has made wireless researchers, vendors, and standards bodies look beyond

Modulation compression is a technique considered in the recent Open-RAN (O-RAN) framework, which has continued the 3GPP effort toward the definition of new virtualized and multi-vendor RAN architectures. Basically, fronthaul compression is achieved by means of reducing the modulation order, thus enabling a dramatic reduction of the required fronthaul capacity with a simple technique. In this work,

Aerial platforms are expected to deliver enhanced and seamless connectivity in the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks and beyond (B5G). Alternatively, reconfigurable smart surfaces (RSS), which smartly exploit/recycle signal reflections in the environment, are increasingly being recognized as a new wireless communication paradigm to improve communication links. In fact, their reduced cost, low

High altitude platform station (HAPS) systems have recently attracted renewed attention. While terrestrial and satellite technologies are well established for providing connectivity services, they face certain shortcomings and challenges, which could be addressed by complementing them with HAPS systems. In this article, we envision a HAPS as a super macro base station, to which we refer as HAPS-SMBS

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is expected to be a promising solution in next generation cellular technologies to efficiently provide connectivity over a wide area at low cost. However, autonomous D2D communication introduces challenging technical issues, and how to achieve the benefit and cooperation of users is an unsolved issue. To address this problem, we propose a novel concept of a bandwidth

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In this first issue of the Optical Communications and Networks Series in 2021, we have selected four intriguing articles reporting on recent progress in optical communications and networking. They address (i) the optical wireless communic ation technologies for in-body and transdermal biomedical applications; (ii) the optical-domain multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) signal processing with the

This article discusses the fundamental architectures for optical-wireless-systems for biomedical-ap-plications. After summarizing the main applications and reporting their requirements, we describe the characteristics of the transdermal and in-body optical channels (OCs) as well as the challenges that they impose in the design of communication systems. Specifically, we provide three possible architectures

Wireless communication is facing an ever increasing thirst for high-quality data transmission. However, this imposes high demands on the radio access networks (RANs), where optical fiber has been widely used for both the backhaul and fronthaul. However, the explosive escalation of wireless tele-traffic tests the limits of the RAN's revenue vs. cost trade-off, which motivates low-cost designs. Hence

Optical communication is developing rapidly in the directions of hardware resource diversification, transmission system flexibility, and network function virtualization. Its proliferation poses a significant challenge to traditional optical communication management and control systems. Digital twin (DT), a technology that utilizes data, models, and algorithms and integrates multiple disciplines, acts

With the development of ocean research, communications from the air to underwater (e.g., aircraft to submarines) are especially important. However, the existing communication methods have their own limitations and wireless communication between underwater and the air has remained an unsolved problem. In this article, we propose a photoacoustic communication based on low-cost passive relays, which is

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.