AI-Driven Evolution in Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence is reshaping wireless systems, transforming them from discrete optimizers into autonomous, learning-enabled infrastructures. As 5G evolves toward 5G-Advanced and 6G, this shift is essential for networks that must operate under tighter reliability, latency, and sustainability constraints while spanning heterogeneous domains, including edge/cloud computing, joint communication and sensing, and non-terrestrial segments. In response, the community has made significant progress on point solutions and components, such as schedulers, channel estimators, and beam managers. However, a comprehensive and consolidated systems view remains an open challenge. The field still lacks a framework that effectively couples learning with overarching control, governance, and lifecycle operations.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute your latest findings to this Special Issue. This Special Issue aims to respond to that gap by positioning AI not as an add-on, but as the organizing principle for design, orchestration, and assurance across the full stack. We welcome contributions that advance learning-assisted physical and MAC layers; integrate cross-layer control with O-RAN and service management/orchestration; demonstrate digital-twin methods for safe exploration and sim-to-real transfer; and extend terrestrial systems with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, non-terrestrial and LEO constellations, and joint communication-and-sensing. Submissions should move beyond accuracy-only narratives to report latency distributions, reliability under shift, interpretability and operator trust, data and model governance, privacy preservation, and the compute/energy/carbon costs of intelligence. By emphasizing open artifacts—datasets, code, pipelines—and validation on realistic channels, testbeds, and field deployments, the collection aims to provide evidence that travels from simulation to operations.

The Aim of the Special Issue is to treat Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the organizing principle for the design, orchestration, and assurance across the full technology stack. This focus is fully aligned with the journal’s Aims and Scope. The way the subject relates to the journal's mission is by fundamentally advancing fundamental methods and practical architectures for next-generation communications, computing, and sensing. This Special Issue, by its very nature, treats AI as the core enabling technology, which aligns directly with the journal's Aims and Scope for next-generation communications, computing, and sensing. In terms of publication goals, the Special Issue is calibrated to attract at least ten high-quality contributions. This target is at least ten high-quality articles. If that crucial threshold is reached by securing this number of excellent submissions, the collection may be issued in book form in accordance with the journal’s policies. To reiterate, if this number is reached, the collection may be considered for publication in book form, per journal policy.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Learning-assisted beamforming and channel estimation
• Sample-efficient and energy-efficient control of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
• AI for non-terrestrial networks, including routing, handover, and Doppler mitigation
• Joint communication and sensing with learning-based fusion
• Semantic and goal-oriented communications
• Intent-based networking
• Intelligent spectrum sharing and coexistence
• Lifecycle MLOps for wireless, data governance, drift detection, online learning guardrails, rollback strategies
• Privacy-preserving and federated or split learning at the edge
• Robustness to non-stationarity, adversarial conditions, and hardware impairments
• Carbon and energy-aware scheduling and inference placement
• Digital twin methodologies for safe experimentation and sim-to-real deployment
• Optimization for Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) (e.g., VR/AR, high-speed video)
• Optimization for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) (e.g., Tactile Internet, industrial automation)
• Scalability and management for Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) (e.g., massive IoT, smart cities)
• AI-driven Network Slicing and end-to-end service orchestration
• AI-driven security, anomaly detection, and threat mitigation
• Edge AI and inference optimization for edge computing

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Iacovos I. Ioannou
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Network is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• AI native wireless
• 5G advanced
• 6G
• O-RAN
• massive MIMO
• reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
• non-terrestrial networks
• joint communication and sensing
• semantic communications
• network automation