Final submissions due: CLOSED
Publication issue: September/October 2017
Guest Editors: N.K. Shankaranarayanan and Arunabha Ghosh (ic5-2017@computer.org)
Call for Papers
The past two decades have witnessed phenomenal progress in wireless access to the Internet and telecommunication services from mobile devices, ranging from smartphones to laptops to specialized devices. Cellular network operators in several countries have deployed fourth-generation long-term evolution (4G LTE) radio technologies to keep up with the demand from the market, especially for video and social media services. Long-term plans are under way for cellular networks to continue to evolve and grow in performance, flexibility, quality of experience, and energy efficiency. The fifth generation — 5G — is the umbrella term for the next generation of cellular network technologies to be deployed in the 2020 time frame.
The 5G umbrella includes advances on several different fronts, all of which are required for vendors and mobile network operators to meet market demands with cost-effective deployments. Radio access technologies are a critical foundation for mobile services, and are often a constraining factor, as users now expect mobile services to fully match wired services. In addition to enhancing existing services, 5G is expected to enable new demanding services, such as virtual reality and remotely controlled machines. Compared to 4G, the targets for 5G radio performance include higher user rates, stringent end-to-end latency, higher spectral efficiency, and greater user density, as well as a much larger number of end users. Use of advanced radio techniques — such as advanced multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) — is envisioned to support these requirements.
As spectrum choice increases, 5G devices will have a greater ability to utilize different bands, including wider radio bands at higher frequencies and unlicensed spectrums. Thus, 5G must address the expected explosion in the number of end devices as a result of machine to machine (M2M) communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). More end users with different traffic requirements will place a significant burden on the network. The network architectures and technologies are going through a major transformation to provide flexibility, scalability, and the ability to handle a heterogeneous mix of usage scenarios, and cost-effective deployment and operations. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will be widely used to bring cloud computing capabilities to both the radio access network and the core network. Software-defined mobile network (SDN) architectures and network slicing will provide enough flexibility to support a diverse mix of services and deployment scenarios. Key network protocols and functions such as mobility management will change to handle the required scale and to take full advantage of NFV and SDN.
As 5G devices and networks are standardized, designed, tested, and deployed, they will provide incremental changes and evolution in some areas, and profound discontinuous changes in others. What are the key technology trends and primary challenges of 5G? How will 5G change mobile services, access and core networks, and the Internet? How are the challenging new use cases and services driving changes in architecture and standards? Which areas of technology will see incremental changes, and which areas will see disruptive innovation? Will the implementation of 5G play out differently in various markets?
This special issue will provide a comprehensive and timely update of 5G radio and network technologies. We seek papers from industry and academia to address these themes. Of particular interest are review and tutorial articles that summarize the subject area, and provide guidance to network and service researchers and planners so that they can anticipate the impact of 5G on networks and envision new mobile services. Relevant topics include:
- innovations in 5G radio technologies;
- innovations in 5G network architectures;
- new mobile services and use cases in 5G;
- IoT’s impact on 5G;
- multi-radio access technology for 5G;
- network function virtualization (NFV) for 5G;
- SDN’s role in 5G networks;
- network slicing architectures for 5G;
- mobile edge computing in 5G;
- security architecture solutions for 5G; and
- geographical variation in 5G deployment models.
Submission Guidelines
All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words, focused on Internet technologies and implementations. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC’s international readership—primarily practicing engineers and academics who are looking for material that introduces new technology and broadens familiarity with current topics. We do not accept white papers, and papers which are primarily theoretical or mathematical must clearly relate the mathematical content to a real-life or engineering application. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:443/ic-cs) to create or access an account, which you can use to log on to IC’s Author Center and upload your submission.