Editorial for MONET Special Issue on Networking in 5G Mobile Communications Systems: Key Technologies and Challenges

Abstract

Editorial: This special issue includes eight high quality papers in the research area of Networking in 5G Mobile Communications Systems. With an ever-increasing number of mobile devices and the resulting explosive mobile traffic, 5G networking system should be re-designed by combining both communication and computation technologies. This special issue kicks off with an article on the cloudified wireless network architecture, namely BCloud-based Wireless Network: Virtualized, Reconfigurable, Smart Wireless Network to Enable 5G Technologies^, co-authored by Min Chen, Long Hu, Yin Zhang, Tarik Taleb and Zhengguo Sheng. The article reveals that 5G is a multiservice and multi-technology integrated network, meeting the future needs of a wide range of big data and the rapid development of numerous businesses, and enhancing the user experience by providing smart and customized services. Then, the authors propose a cloud-based wireless network architecture with four components, i.e., mobile cloud, cloud-based radio access network, reconfigurable network and big data centre, which is capable of providing a virtualized, reconfigurable, smart wireless network. The second article, BHybrid Architecture Performance Analysis for Device-to-Device Communication in 5G Cellular Network^, co-authored by Zhijian Lin, Zhibin Gao, Lianfen Huang, Chi-Yuan Chen and Han-Chieh Chao, first develops a new hybrid architecture concept for D2D communications, which combines ISM 2.4G spectrum as the Out-Band mode and uses Bluetooth and Wifi-Direct with the cellular spectrum as the InBand mode. And then a scheme is designed to form the Out-Band cluster and makes the following periodic signaling interaction via the Bluetooth interface. Traffic is transferred via the Wifi-Direct interface inside the cluster but carried on the cellular spectrum among the clusters. For the topic of spectrum sharing and cognitive radio techniques, the third article in the special issue, BA Cyclostationarity-Based Implicit Channel for Cognitive Radio Applications^, co-authored by Tianheng Xu, Sha Yao and Honglin Hu, provides a Cyclostationarity-based Implicit Channel (CIC), which can assist conflictavoidance coexistence for radio systems in the cognitive radio networks. The proposed implicit channel works as an add-on channel to a conventional OFDM system, which supplies extra communication opportunities without affecting the performance of the main system. Progressively, the article introduces the system model, interprets the operational principle, and manifests the modulation/demodulation scheme for the CIC technique. Afterwards, performance investigation is presented, showing the potential feasibility of the CIC technique being adopted in the future cognitive radio networks. The next article BReliable Machine-to-Machine Multicast Services with Multi-Radio Cooperative Retransmissions^ * Xiaohu Ge xhge@mail.hust.edu.cn