I welcome you to the fourth issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2021. This issue includes 23 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Internet Technologies,” “Network Security,” “Network Virtualization,” “Optical Communications,” “Vehicular and Sensor Communications,” and “Wireless Communications

Trusted third parties (TTPs) are frequently used for serving as an authority to issue and verify transactions in applications. Although the TTP-based paradigm provides customers with convenience, it causes a whole set of inevitable problems such as security threats, privacy vulnerabilities, and censorship. The TTP-based paradigm is not suitable for all modern networks, e.g., 5G and beyond networks

Online advertising has become the backbone of the Internet economy by revolutionizing business marketing. It provides a simple and efficient way for advertisers to display their advertisements to specific individual users, and over the last couple of years has contributed to an explosion in the income stream for several Web-based businesses. For example, Google’s income from advertising grew 51.6%

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is threat information intended for security purposes. However, use for incident response demands standardization. This study examines the broader security incident response perspective. Introducing 18 core concepts, we assist efforts to establish and assess current standardization approaches. We further provide the reader with a detailed analysis of 6 incident response

Underwater swarm robotics is an emerging topic. Compared to individual autonomous vehicles, high-capacity communication links are required between the mobile agents. In this tutorial, suitable communication technologies are studied, with emphasis on LED-based underwater optical wireless communications. A comprehensive overview about challenges, advances, and practical aspects of underwater swarm robotics

The advanced notebooks, mobile phones, and Internet applications in today’s world that we use are all entrenched in classical communication bits of zeros and ones. Classical Internet has laid its foundation originating from the amalgamation of mathematics and Claude Shannon’s theory of information. However, today’s Internet technology is a playground for eavesdroppers. This poses a serious challenge

Sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks will have to cope with diverse threats on a space-air-ground integrated network environment, novel technologies, and an accessible user information explosion. However, for now, security and privacy issues for 6G remain largely in concept. This survey provides a systematic overview of security and privacy issues based on prospective technologies for 6G in the physical

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, vehicles and other intelligent components in an intelligent transportation system (ITS) are connected, forming vehicular networks (VNs) that provide efficient and safe traffic and ubiquitous access to various applications. However, as the number of nodes in an ITS increases, it is challenging to satisfy a varied and large number of service requests with different

I Welcome you to the third issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2021. This issue includes 18 articles covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications,” “Internet Technologies,” “IoT and M2M,” “Network and Service Management and Green Communications,” “Network Security,” “Network Virtualization

This paper presents the first comprehensive tutorial on a promising research field located at the frontier of two well-established domains, neurosciences and wireless communications, motivated by the ongoing efforts to define the Sixth Generation of Mobile Networks (6G). In particular, this tutorial first provides a novel integrative approach that bridges the gap between these two seemingly disparate

The LoRa radio technology is one of the most prominent choices in the Internet of Things Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) industry due to its versatile and robust technical characteristics along with its ability to achieve long communication ranges combined with low energy consumption and reduced cost. One of the main issues in LoRa networks is how many end-devices can be reporting efficiently

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be ripe for the deployment of novel machine learning algorithm for both network and application management. However, given the presence of massively distributed and private datasets, it is challenging to use classical centralized learning algorithms in the IoT. To overcome this challenge, federated learning can be a promising solution that enables on-device machine

Distributed computing has become a common approach for large-scale computation tasks due to benefits such as high reliability, scalability, computation speed, and cost-effectiveness. However, distributed computing faces critical issues related to communication load and straggler effects. In particular, computing nodes need to exchange intermediate results with each other in order to calculate the final

Towards future intelligent vehicular network, the machine learning as the promising artificial intelligence tool is widely researched to intelligentize communication and networking functions. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on various machine learning techniques applied to both communication and network parts in vehicular network. To benefit reading, we first give a preliminary on

The Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have become essential for our daily lives in contexts such as our homes, buildings, cities, health, transportation, manufacturing, infrastructure, and agriculture. However, they have become popular targets of attacks, due to their inherent limitations which create vulnerabilities. Honeypots and

When DNS was created, nobody expected that it would have become the base for the digital economy and a prime target for cybercriminals. And nobody expected that one main asset of the digital economy would have been users’ browsing habits, putting at risk their privacy. The DNS was designed and implemented according to speed, scalability, and reliability criteria, whereas security and privacy did not

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the wide penetration of wireless networks, the surging demand for data communications and computing calls for the emerging edge computing paradigm. By moving the services and functions located in the cloud to the proximity of users, edge computing can provide powerful communication, storage, networking, and communication capacity. The resource

The performance of wireless networks is fundamentally limited by the aggregate interference, which depends on the spatial distributions of the interferers, channel conditions, and user traffic patterns (or queueing dynamics). These factors usually exhibit spatial and temporal correlations and thus make the performance of large-scale networks environment-dependent (i.e., dependent on network topology

Defensive deception is a promising approach for cyber defense. Via defensive deception, a defender can anticipate and prevent attacks by misleading or luring an attacker, or hiding some of its resources. Although defensive deception is garnering increasing research attention, there has not been a systematic investigation of its key components, the underlying principles, and its tradeoffs in various

Electrification turned over a new leaf in aviation by introducing new types of aerial vehicles along with new means of transportation. Addressing a plethora of use cases, drones are gaining attention in the industry and increasingly appear in the sky. Emerging concepts of flying taxi enable passengers to be transported over several tens of kilometers. Therefore, unmanned traffic management systems

After decades of unprecedented development, modern networks have evolved far beyond expectations in terms of scale and complexity. In many cases, traditional traffic engineering (TE) approaches fail to address the quality of service (QoS) requirements of modern networks. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proved to be a feasible and effective solution for autonomously controlling

Edge computing is a (r)evolutionary extension of traditional cloud computing. It expands central cloud infrastructure with execution environments close to the users in terms of latency in order to enable a new generation of cloud applications. This paradigm shift has opened the door for telecommunications operators, mobile and fixed network vendors: they have joined the cloud ecosystem as essential

Due to their complexity and opaqueness, cellular networks have been subject to numerous attacks over the past few decades. These attacks are a real problem to telecom operators and cost them about USD 28.3 Billion annually, as reported by the Communications Fraud Control Association . SIMBox fraud is one of the most prevalent of these telephone frauds. It consists of diverting international calls on

Drone security is currently a major topic of discussion among researchers and industrialists. Although there are multiple applications of drones, if the security challenges are not anticipated and required architectural changes are not made, the upcoming drone applications will not be able to serve their actual purpose. Therefore, in this paper, we present a detailed review of the security-critical

Big Data (BD) platforms have a long tradition of leveraging trends and technologies from the broader computer network and communication community. For several years, dedicated servers of homogeneous clusters were employed as the dominant paradigm in BD networks. In recent years, the BD landscape has changed, porting different deployment architectures with various network models. This trend has resulted

The advent of softwarized networks has enabled the deployment of chains of virtual network and service components on computational resources from the cloud up to the edge, creating a continuum of virtual resources. The next generation of low latency applications (e.g., Virtual Reality (VR), autonomous cars) adds even more stringent requirements to the infrastructure, calling for considerable advancements

The increasing digitization and interconnection of legacy Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) open new vulnerability surfaces, exposing such systems to malicious attackers. Furthermore, since ICSs are often employed in critical infrastructures (e.g., nuclear plants) and manufacturing companies (e.g., chemical industries), attacks can lead to devastating physical damages. In dealing with this security

Anonymity networks are becoming increasingly popular in today’s online world as more users attempt to safeguard their online privacy. Tor is currently the most popular anonymity network in use and provides anonymity to both users and services (hidden services). However, the anonymity provided by Tor is also being misused in various ways. Hosting illegal sites for selling drugs, hosting command and

Automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes, and in particular hybrid-ARQ (HARQ) schemes, which jointly adopt forward error correction (FEC) and ARQ, are essential to provide reliable data transmission in wireless communications systems. However, the feedback from the receiver to the transmitter and the retransmission process used in ARQ incurs significant cost in terms of power efficiency, throughput,

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed infrastructure to deliver digital contents to end users with high performance. CDNs are critical to provide and protect the availability of Internet contents. However, adversaries can not only evade the CDN protection but also weaponize CDN resources to mount more sophisticated attacks. In this paper, we provide the first survey on CDN security. We

The widespread use of mobile devices, as well as the increasing popularity of mobile services has raised serious cybersecurity challenges. In the last years, the number of cyberattacks has grown dramatically, as well as their complexity. Traditional cybersecurity systems have failed to detect complex attacks, unknown malware, and they do not guarantee the preservation of user privacy. Consequently

Network security has become an area of significant importance more than ever as highlighted by the eye-opening numbers of data breaches, attacks on critical infrastructure, and malware/ransomware/cryptojacker attacks that are reported almost every day. Increasingly, we are relying on networked infrastructure and with the advent of IoT, billions of devices will be connected to the Internet, providing

Distributed machine learning (DML) techniques, such as federated learning, partitioned learning, and distributed reinforcement learning, have been increasingly applied to wireless communications. This is due to improved capabilities of terminal devices, explosively growing data volume, congestion in the radio interfaces, and increasing concern of data privacy. The unique features of wireless systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring new opportunities for improving several services for the Society, from transportation to agriculture, from smart cities to fleet management. In this framework, massive connectivity represents one of the key issues. This is especially relevant when IoT systems are expected to cover a large geographical area or a region not reached by terrestrial network

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

We would like to welcome the readers to the second issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2021. This issue includes 21 articles covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications,” “Vehicular and Sensor Communications,” “IoT and M2M,” “Network Security,” “Multimedia Communications,” “Internet

A High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) is a network node that operates in the stratosphere at an of altitude around 20 km and is instrumental for providing communication services. Precipitated by technological innovations in the areas of autonomous avionics, array antennas, solar panel efficiency levels, and battery energy densities, and fueled by flourishing industry ecosystems, the HAPS has emerged

Joint radar and communication (JRC) has recently attracted substantial attention. The first reason is that JRC allows individual radar and communication systems to share spectrum bands and thus improves the spectrum utilization. The second reason is that JRC enables a single hardware platform, e.g., an autonomous vehicle or a UAV, to simultaneously perform the communication function and the radar function

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that makes people’s lives smart by conquering a plethora of diverse application and service areas. In near future, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks provide the connectivity for this IoT ecosystem. It has been carefully designed to facilitate the exponential growth in the IoT field. Network slicing is one of the key technologies in the 5G

Recently, there has been an increase in studies relating to the Internet of Things (IoT) in various fields, such as smart cities, smart homes, smart factories, and healthcare. In an IoT environment, several entities, including users, devices, and information resources, are interconnected and interworked with services. Therefore, interoperability between different entities is essential to accomplish

In the above article [1] , the references in Tables V – IX were incorrectly assigned. The corrected tables are provided here.

With the emergence of low-cost smart and connected IoT devices, the area of cyber-physical security is becoming increasingly important. Past research has demonstrated new threat vectors targeting the transition process between the cyber and physical domains, where the attacker exploits the sensing system as an attack surface for signal injection or extraction of private information. Recently, there

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), also known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), or large intelligent surfaces (LISs), 1 have received significant attention for their potential to enhance the capacity and coverage of wireless networks by smartly reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment. Therefore, RISs are considered a promising technology for the sixth-generation (6G) of

The Internet of Things (IoT) is penetrating many facets of our daily life with the proliferation of intelligent services and applications empowered by artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques require centralized data collection and processing that may not be feasible in realistic application scenarios due to the high scalability of modern IoT networks and growing data privacy concerns

The end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) guarantee is quite important for network optimization. The current 5G and conceived 6G network in the future with ultra high density, bandwidth, mobility and large scale brings urgent requirement of high efficient end-to-end optimization methods. The conventional network optimization methods without learning and intelligent decision

The incumbent Internet of Things suffers from poor scalability and elasticity exhibiting in communication, computing, caching and control (4Cs) problems. The recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms can potentially address the above problems of IoT systems. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey that overviews DRL algorithms and discusses DRL-enabled IoT

Optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) is eminently suitable for mitigating the multi-path and chromatic dispersion in both Visible Light Communications (VLC) and Optical Fiber Communications. We commence our discourse by surveying the conception and historic evolution of O-OFDM designed for both VLC and optical fiber, culminating in the birth of its most flexible design alternative

Molecular communication (MC) engineering is inspired by the use of chemical signals as information carriers in cell biology. The biological nature of chemical signaling makes MC a promising methodology for interdisciplinary applications requiring communication between cells and other microscale devices. However, since the life sciences and communications engineering fields have distinct approaches

In the current network-based computing world, where the number of interconnected devices grows exponentially, their diversity, malfunctions, and cybersecurity threats are increasing at the same rate. To guarantee the correct functioning and performance of novel environments such as Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, or crowdsensing, it is crucial to identify the capabilities of their devices (e.g., sensors

In order to meet their stringent dependability requirements, most modern packet-switched communication networks support fast-recovery mechanisms in the data plane. While reactions to failures in the data plane can be significantly faster compared to control plane mechanisms, implementing fast recovery in the data plane is challenging, and has recently received much attention in the literature. This

Driven by the quality of experience (QoE) requirement of video streaming applications in the smart city, smart education, immersive service, and connected vehicle scenarios, the existing network poses significant challenges, including ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-large storage, and ultra-low latency requirements, etc. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a potential technology, which can provide computation-intensive

Modern electronic devices have become “smart” as well as omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. From small household devices to large industrial machines, smart devices have become very popular in every possible application domain. Smart devices in our homes, offices, buildings, and cities can connect with other devices as well as with the physical world around them. This increasing popularity has also

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently witnessed significant advances that have led to multiple successes in solving sequential decision-making problems in various domains, particularly in wireless communications. The next generation of wireless networks is expected to provide scalable, low-latency, ultra-reliable services empowered by the application of data-driven Artificial Intelligence

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

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

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has introduced the paradigm of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) to enable efficient and fast data processing in mobile networks. Among other technological requirements, security and privacy are significant factors in the realization of MEC deployments. In this paper, we analyse the security and privacy of the MEC system. We introduce a thorough

The Augmented Reality (AR) technology enhances the human perception of the world by combining the real environment with the virtual space. With the explosive growth of powerful, less expensive mobile devices, and the emergence of sophisticated communication infrastructure, Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications are gaining increased popularity. MAR allows users to run AR applications on mobile

Robotic applications nowadays are widely adopted to enhance operational automation and performance of real-world Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) including Industry 4.0, agriculture, healthcare, and disaster management. These applications are composed of latency-sensitive, data-heavy, and compute-intensive tasks. The robots, however, are constrained in the computational power and storage capacity. The