Recent Technical Developments in Energy-Efficient 5G Mobile Cells

Dear Colleagues,

At present, 4G systems provide a universal platform for broadband mobile services. However, mobile traffic is still growing at an unprecedented rate, and the need for more sophisticated broadband services is pushing the limits of the current standards to provide an even tighter integration between wireless technologies and higher speeds. The change in the nature of services and devices, along with pressures on the operation and capital costs put stringent limits on the design of mobile networks. Moreover, energy efficiency is now at the forefront of the socio-economic agenda, creating market drivers towards energy compliant handsets and networking devices.

This has led to the need for a new generation of mobile communications, the so-called 5G. Although 5G systems are not expected to penetrate the market until 2020, the evolution towards 5G is widely accepted to be the logical convergence of internet services with existing mobile networking standards, leading to the commonly used term “mobile internet” over heterogeneous networks, with very high connectivity speeds.

This Special Issue aims to narrow the gap between the current networking technologies and the foreseen requirements that are targeted at the future development of the 5G mobile and wireless communications networks in terms of the following:

• higher networking capacity
• ability to support more users
• lower cost per bit
• enhanced energy efficiency
• adaptability to new services and devices (examples, smart cities, and the Internet of things (IoT)).

Specific Topics

It is expected that the future mobile networks will be built using small cells (such as femto, pico, and relay) and heterogeneous cells, which include WiFi hotspots, among others. The dense deployment of these cells and their coexistence are all new and important research challenges for future 5G and beyond. Submissions can focus on the conceptual and applied research in topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Energy efficient and multi-standard RF front-end
• Network coded cooperation for mobile cells
• Reconfigurable or multimode RF spectrum operation
• MIMO/mMIMO for 5G mobile networks
• Reconfigurable antenna array for 4G/5G handsets and base stations
• High-speed and energy-efficient connectivity on demand
• Secure networking coding for mobile small cells
• Enabling mobile small cells and network virtualization
• 5G small cells technologies and applications
• Emerging the IoT applications with the new 5G developments.

Submissions should be of high enough quality for an international journal, and should not be submitted or published elsewhere. However, the extended versions of conference papers that show significant improvement (minimal of over 30%) can be considered for review in this Special Issue.  In addition, we welcome review papers covering the subjects of this Special Issue.

Technical Program Committee Members:

1. Prof. Peter Excell  Wrexham University
2. Prof. Jonathan Rodriguez  South Wales University
3. Prof. Simon Shepherd  University of Bradford
4. Prof. Irfan Awan  University of Bradford
5. Prof. Rami Qahwaji  University of Bradford
6. Dr. Issa Elfergani  Instituto de Telecomunicações, Averio, Portugal
7. Dr. James M Noras  University of Bradford
8. Dr. Chan H See  University of Bolton

Prof. Dr. Raed Abd-Alhameed
Guest Editor

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