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An editorial is presented which discusses the communications services from the perspectives of mobile communication application and traditional macrocellular-based mobile communication network architecture. It also discusses the 5G telecommunication and topics covered by the periodical IEEE Communications Magazine, including cyber risk, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications, and optimization techniques for computation, communication, and storage.

As 5G mobile networks are bringing about global societal benefits, the design phase for 6G has started. Evolved 5G and 6G will need sophisticated AI to automate information delivery simultaneously for mass autonomy, human machine interfacing, and targeted healthcare. Trust will become increasingly critical for 6G as it manages a wide range of mission-critical services. As we migrate from traditional mathematical model-dependent optimization to data-dependent deep learning, the insight and trust we have in our optimization modules decrease. This loss of model explainability means we are vulnerable to malicious data, poor neural network design, and the loss of trust from stakeholders and the general public -- all with a range of legal implications. In this review, we outline the core methods of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in a wireless network setting, including public and legal motivations, definitions of explainability, performance vs. explainability trade-offs, and XAI algorithms. Our review is grounded in case studies for both wireless PHY and MAC layer optimization and provide the community with an important research area to embark upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ubiquitous usage of mobile devices, we are witnessing the emergence of commercial crowdsourcing applications that leverage the power of the crowd (workers) to collect massive data. However, the participation unbalance problem commonly occurs in existing location-dependent mobile crowdsourcing applications as workers tend to select nearby tasks while far away tasks are ignored. In this article, we propose a novel task bundling based incentive mechanism that dynamically bundles tasks with different popularity together to solve the participation unbalance problem. We consider the continuous sensing scenarios and categorize tasks into high-popularity (hot) tasks and low-popularity (cold) tasks at each round according to the real-time participation situation of tasks at the last round. We then formulate the task bundling problem as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose a dynamic task bundling algorithm that dynamically bundles cold tasks with hot tasks at each round. The experimental results demonstrate that the bundling incentive mechanism has a more balanced participation for location-dependent tasks in mobile crowdsourcing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decisive progress in 5G mobile technology, fueled by a rapid proliferation of computation- hungry and delay-sensitive services, puts economic pressure on the research community to rethink the fundamentals of underlying networking architectures. Along these lines, the first half of this article offers a first-hand tutorial on the most recent advances in content-centric networking, emerging user applications, as well as enabling system architectures. We establish that while significant progress has been made along the individual vectors of communications, caching, and computing, together with some promising steps in proposing hybrid functionalities, the ultimate synergy behind a fully integrated solution is not nearly well understood. Against this background, the second half of this work carefully brings into perspective additional important factors, such as user mobility patterns, aggressive application requirements, and associated operator deployment capabilities, to conduct comprehensive system-level analysis. Furthermore, supported by a full-fledged practical trial on a live cellular network, our systematic findings reveal the most dominant factors in converged 5G-grade communications, caching, and computing layouts, as well as indicate the natural optimization points for system operators to leverage the maximum available benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging scenario to be considered for further evolution of Long-Term Evolution and beyond is a multi-carrier ultra-dense network (MC-UDN). Advanced carrier aggregation (ACA) techniques, such as carrier switching, lightweight carriers, opportunistic transmissions, and adaptive resource optimization schemes, provide important means for the MC-UDN to allocate carrier-level resources properly and efficiently according to traffic load, channel, and interference conditions across the network. In this article, the general background, motivations, high-level design, and performance benefits of ACA techniques for the MC-UDN are described. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software-defined networking has brought both performance and management benefits to wired networks. It is natural to wonder if SDN principles also apply and can deliver similar benefits to RANs. It is this question that we intend to address in this article. We first highlight that the core SDN principle of decoupling control and data planes already exists in RANs in the form of self-organizing networking solutions, which can optimize RAN performance at coarse timescales. In addition to control/data plane separation, we also elaborate how fine timescale optimizations such as coordinated multi-point transmission are made practical with the help of cloud RANs (C-RANS), which offer the notion of processing decoupled from transmission within the data plane. We finally discuss the potential and challenges related to a less explored application of SDN in the RAN, which is programming the fronthaul network in a C-RAN. We argue that this novel notion of software-defined fronthaul, SDF, has the power to orchestrate novel applications and thus should be a key area of focus in RAN optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The telecommunication community has reached a broad consensus on the vision that future transport architecture will be dominated by optical in combination with IP. This implies a complete reassignment of the functions traditionally handled by legacy intermediate layers to packet and optical layers only. Here, current advances in photonic technologies and architectures enable the optical layer to become the ideal companion of the packet world and to unlock an effective packet offload toward flexible and dynamic optical pipes. A global crosslayer optimization is needed to minimize the misalignment between cost and revenues, and manage the rising tide of IP traffic. In this article, we describe this evolving path and explore the impact on network planning and traffic provisioning, also considering implications on the cloud scenario and sighting the software defined networks horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on planning and replanning of virtual infrastructures over optical cloud infrastructures comprising integrated optical network and IT resources. This concept has been developed in the context of the European project GEYSERS. GEYSERS has proposed a novel multi-layer architecture, described in detail, that employs optical networking capable of provisioning optical network and IT resources for end-to-end cloud service delivery. The procedures required to perform virtual infrastructure planning and replanning at the different architecture layers are also detailed. An optimization scheme suitable to dynamically plan and replan virtual infrastructures is presented and compared to conventional approaches, and the benefits of dynamic replanning are discussed and quantified. The final project demonstration, focusing on planning, replanning, and dynamically establishing virtual infrastructures over the physical resources, is presented, while some emulation results are provided to further evaluate the performance of the GEYSERS solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerations of efficiency often play an important role in debates on how to allocate new spectrum. Regulators want to maximize the common good, and try to use efficiency as a tool to do so; consequently, all the stakeholders strive to show that their proposal leads to efficient use of resources. However, often the discussion on particular methods or allocations becomes deadlocked. In this article we explore what is meant by efficiency metrics in wireless networks and what underlies the widely divergent claims for the relative efficiency of competing solutions. Our treatment attempts to take into account the regulatory and policy viewpoints on the development of system efficiency metrics. We will argue that it is important to define system optimization considerations and design goals for future wireless systems more clearly than has been done to date. We will show that although this may sound simple, it is far from it. We argue that efficiency needs to be analyzed within a full N-dimensional design space, and that connections between technology and policy need to be stated explicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A content adaptive, network aware approach for joint optimization of wireless video transmission is presented in this article. The joint system optimization approach has been developed in the framework of the 1ST PHOENIX project (www.ist-phoenix.org). After a description of the considered cross-layer approach and of the information to be exchanged among the system component blocks, the concept of "JSCC/D controllers" is introduced. Results obtained through the demonstrator realized as proof-of-concept for the described paradigm are then shown, confirming the validity of the described joint optimization approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]