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

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 2019. 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,” “Internet Technologies,” and “Network Security

Low latency applications, such as multimedia communications, autonomous vehicles, and Tactile Internet are the emerging applications for next-generation wireless networks, such as 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. Existing physical-layer channel models, however, do not explicitly consider quality-of-service (QoS) aware related parameters under specific delay constraints. To investigate the performance

In order to effectively provide ultra reliable low latency communications and pervasive connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, next-generation wireless networks can leverage intelligent, data-driven functions enabled by the integration of machine learning (ML) notions across the wireless core and edge infrastructure. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive tutorial that overviews

As a key technique for enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML) is capable of solving complex problems without explicit programming. Motivated by its successful applications to many practical tasks like image recognition, both industry and the research community have advocated the applications of ML in wireless communication. This paper comprehensively surveys the recent advances of

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a key technology to meet the user demands in performance and quality of services (QoS) for next generation communication systems. Due to a large number of antennas and radio frequency (RF) chains, complexity of the symbol detectors increased rapidly in a massive MIMO uplink receiver. Thus, the research to find the perfect massive MIMO detection algorithm

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in communications and networking. Modern networks, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, become more decentralized and autonomous. In such networks, network entities need to make decisions locally to maximize the network performance under uncertainty of network

Time, polarization, and wavelength multiplexing schemes have been used to satisfy the growing need of transmission capacity. Using space as a new dimension for communication systems has been recently suggested as a versatile technique to address future bandwidth issues. We review the potentials of harnessing the space as an additional degree of freedom for communication applications including free

During the last decade, the exponential growth of mobile devices and wireless services created a huge demand for radio frequency-based technologies. Meanwhile, the lighting industry has been revolutionized due to the popularization of LED light bulbs, which are more economical and efficient. In that context, visible light communication (VLC) is a disruptive technology based on LEDs that offers a free

Full dimension (FD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has attracted substantial research attention from both wireless industry and academia in the last few years as a promising technique for next-generation wireless communication networks. FD-MIMO scenarios utilize a planar 2-D active antenna system (AAS) that not only allows a large number of antenna elements to be placed within feasible

Future Internet (FI) scenarios envisage ubiquitous broadband coverage and seamless mobility, enabling the availability of personalized network connectivity at all places and with a high quality of service (QoS). In such a heterogeneous and complex environment, vertical handover (VHO) management is key for achieving the connectivity objectives, but also presents several challenges. In surveying this

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing theory for resource management in the evolving fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. The 5G wireless networks are envisioned to overcome existing limitations of cellular networks in terms of data rate, capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, coverage, reliability, and cost per information

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently rapidly grown to facilitate a wide range of innovative applications that can fundamentally change the way cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are designed. CPSs are a modern generation of systems with synergic cooperation between computational and physical potentials that can interact with humans through several new mechanisms. The main advantages of using UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed as wireless relays or aerial base stations to improve network connectivity and coverage in cellular networks. UAVs can also be used to significantly enhance the performance of mobile ad-hoc networks and wireless sensor networks. In the future, UAVs are expected to become an integral part of the fifth generation wireless networks as well as key enablers

The rapid growth of consumer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is creating promising new business opportunities for cellular operators. On the one hand, UAVs can be connected to cellular networks as new types of user equipment, therefore generating significant revenues for the operators that can guarantee their stringent service requirements. On the other hand, UAVs offer the unprecedented opportunity

This paper provides recent advances in the area of Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) with emphasis on enabling communication technologies, networking issues, and localization techniques. IoUT is enabled by underground things (sensors), communication technology, and networking protocols. This new paradigm of IoUT facilitates the integration of sensing and communication in the underground environment

A new industrial revolution is undergoing, based on a number of technological paradigms. The will to foster and guide this phenomenon has been summarized in the expression “Industry 4.0” (I4.0). Initiatives under this term share the vision that many key technologies underlying Cyber-Physical Systems and Big Data Analytics are converging to a new distributed, highly automated, and highly dynamic production

Transport layer security (TLS) is becoming the de facto standard to provide end-to-end security in the current Internet. IoT and M2M scenarios are not an exception since TLS is also being adopted there. The ability of TLS for negotiating any security parameter, its flexibility and extensibility are responsible for its wide adoption but also for several attacks. Moreover, as it relies on public key

The “Smart World” envisioned by technology will be achieved by the penetration of intelligence into ubiquitous things, including physical objects, cyber-entities, social-elements or individuals, and human thinking. The development of Smart World is enabled by diverse applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) into those components identified as things. Such a smart-world will have features controlled

Current and future wireless applications strongly rely on precise real-time localization. A number of applications, such as smart cities, Internet of Things (IoT), medical services, automotive industry, underwater exploration, public safety, and military systems require reliable and accurate localization techniques. Generally, the most popular localization/positioning system is the global positioning

Over the years, the Internet has been enriched with new available communication technologies, for both fixed and mobile networks and devices, exhibiting an impressive growth in terms of performance, with steadily increasing available data rates. The Internet research community has kept trying to evolve the transport layer protocols to match the capabilities of modern networks, in order to fully reap

Congestion control (CC) has a significant influence on the performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) connections. Over the last three decades, many researchers have extensively studied and proposed a multitude of enhancements to standard TCP CC. However, this topic still inspires both academic and industrial research communities due to the change in Internet application requirements and the

Nowadays, network technologies are essential for transferring and storing various information of users, companies, and industries. However, the growth of the information transfer rate expands the attack surface, offering a rich environment to intruders. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are widespread systems able to passively or actively control intrusive activities in a defined host and network

The development of the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks is gaining momentum to connect almost all aspects of life through the network with much higher speed, very low latency and ubiquitous connectivity. Due to its crucial role in our lives, the network must secure its users, components, and services. The security threat landscape of 5G has grown enormously due to the unprecedented increase

Over the last few years, healthcare administrations have been digitizing their provision of care that led to an increased number of networked medical devices and medical telemetry. Due to such digitization, medical devices have made phenomenal strides in the course of the last half-century. These networked medical devices have enhanced the quality and accessibility of health treatments by achieving

The salient features of cloud computing (such as on-demand self-service, resource pooling, broad network access, rapid elasticity, and measured service) are being exploited by attackers to launch the severe Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Generally, the DDoS attacks in such an environment have been implemented by flooding a huge volume (high-rate) of malicious traffic to exhaust the victim

Blockchain is a technology making the shared registry concept from distributed systems a reality for a number of application domains, from the cryptocurrency one to potentially any industrial system requiring decentralized, robust, trusted, and automated decision making in a multi-stakeholder situation. Nevertheless, the actual advantages in using blockchain instead of any other traditional solution