Editorial: Reliable Communication for Emerging Wireless Networks

As many as 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. It is predicted that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed 11.5 billion by 2019 (nearly 1.5 mobile devices per capita), which poses a huge traffic demand for ubiquitous communications. Data rates are projected to increase by a factor of ten every five years, and with the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) predicted to wirelessly connect trillions of devices across the globe. It is anticipated that we will witness an up to 10,000- fold growth in wireless data traffic by the year 2030. Predictions evidently indicates that the growth in data traffic will cater unprecedented services and applications for machine type communication such as driverless vehicles and drone-based deliveries, smart cities and factories, remote medical diagnosis and surgery, and artificial intelligence- based personalized assistants along with traditional human-centric communications. Coexistence of human-centric and machine-type services as well as hybrids of these will make next generation wireless networks more diverse and complex. Current wireless radio access techniques are not capable of delivering these new applications and services as they are very different from traditional human-centric communications in terms of reliability, latency, energy efficiency, security, flexibility, and connection density. Without novel approaches, future wireless mobile networks (5G and beyond) will grind to a halt unless more capacity is created, on the other hand, to cope with the challenges due to new service categories, a new look on the wireless networks is required to meet performance requirements such as massive connectivity, lower latency, higher reliability, better energy efficiency and security. …