Key Enabling Technologies for Beyond 5G Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Our society is increasingly digitized, hyper-connected, and data driven; hence, new systems and technologies are emerging and introducing paradigm shifts in wireless communi­cation.

The spectrum utilization will be improved and extended towards the THz, thus requiring new transceiver architectures, modulation schemes, and new paradigms for facing the challenging propagation conditions. At such high-frequencies, communications will be based on very narrow and pencil-beam signal propagation with the help of intelligent reflecting surfaces. Energy resources must be efficiently managed at a network-wide scale, also integrating self-sustainable solutions, and new access methods will be needed for truly massive machine-type communications. In addition, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies will strongly impact the design of communication systems across all the layers of the communication architecture, operating both at the link- and system level. These technologies further accelerate the trends of cognition and self-organization, smart spectrum access, physical and medium access layers operation up to resource allocation, and network organization. New communication systems will also constitute a framework for providing services thanks to new computing architectures and the intelligence that spreads across the network. New applications will be provided integrating the communication capabilities with sensing, positioning, imaging, and mobility. In such a scenario, the security should be provided at all levels for a network with embedded trust, also providing protection at the physical layer.

This Special Issue aims at investigating emerging and future key technologies for wireless communication systems in the 5G-and-beyond era.

Dr. Dania Marabissi
Dr. Lorenzo Mucchi
Guest Editors

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