Special Issue on Energy-aware Design for Sustainable 5G Networks

Overview

Energy efficiency has been identified by industry and academia as one of the main drivers for sustainable wireless network design during the last few years. However, it is questionable whether the existing approaches could be applied to the upcoming fifth generation (5G) mobile communications, which encompasses new technologies (e.g., mmWave transmissions, device-to-device communications, network softwarization, virtualization, network slicing, etc.) and architectures (e.g., Cloud Radio Access Network, Mobile Edge Computing, etc.). In addition, the involvement of different stakeholders in next generation networks (such as network operators, service providers and third party infrastructure providers) with possible different strategies makes the design of energy-aware network solutions even more challenging.
To that end, taking into account the vital importance of sustainable 5G networking, novel solutions, i.e., architectures, techniques and communication protocols, need to be devised to enable the energy efficient network operation with the ultimate goal to achieve energy neutral operation (ENO). The design of energy-aware solutions is further leveraged, at least in some environments, by the exploitation of alternative energy sources, reducing the dependence of the wireless networks on the energy grid. For instance, renewable energy sources (e.g., solar, wind) and wireless energy harvesting (defined as the scavenging of the radiated power from data transmissions or by dedicated power beacons) could be exploited to power different network parts, either in the network infrastructure equipment or in the end user side.

Scope

In this context, this special issue aims at collecting original high-quality papers with innovative solutions in the domain of energy efficient 5G mobile networks, as well as comprehensive overviews in this field, highlighting the different communication and networking aspects of a “green” 5G ecosystem and proposing novel energy-aware technologies and architectures.

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Energy-aware network management, including base station switching off
• Energy harvesting solutions for 5G networks
• Energy-aware design for new 5G technologies, including cloud-RAN, network function virtualization (NFV), software defined networking (SDN) and reconfigurable software defined radio (SDR)
• Energy management versus scalable and resource efficient design of massive MIMO and mmWave in 5G
• Energy-aware network slicing and infrastructure sharing strategies
• Stochastic modeling and performance evaluation of 5G renewable energy networks
• Energy-aware design, management and control of small cells in 5G networks
• Energy-aware user association and mobility management in 5G networks
• Renewable energy sharing and management techniques for 5G networks
• Design and exploitation of renewable energy prediction models in 5G networks
• Deployment and security issues for solar-powered Power Beacons (PBs)
• Wireless power transfer for mobile device charging in 5G scenarios
• Energy efficient physical (PHY) layer design for 5G communications
• Energy-oriented standardization activities for 5G networks
• Specifications and network planning optimization for energy neutral operation of 5G networks
• Techno-economic studies, network economics and business models for energy efficient 5G networks
• Testbed deployments and realistic case studies for energy efficient 5G systems

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 1 September 2017
Author notification: 1 December 2017

Submission Guidelines

Please see http://www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom for preparation guidelines and visit http://www.evise.com/evise/jrnl/COMCOM to submit your manuscript. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, please select \”VSI: ENO-5G\” when you reach the Article Type step in the submission process. For further information, please contact the guest editors.

Guest Editors

Angelos Antonopoulos (Lead Guest Editor) (aantonopoulos@cttc.es)
Technological Telecommunications Centre of Catalonia (CTTC), Spain

Burak Kantarci (burak.kantarci@uottawa.ca)
University of Ottawa, Canada

Joel J.P.C. Rodrigues (joeljr@ieee.org)
National institute of Telecommunications (Inatel), Brazil
Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
 

Mohammad S. Obaidat (m.s.obaidat@ieee.org)
Fordham University, NY, USA
 

Antonio Capone (antonio.capone@polimi.it)
Politecnico di Milano, Italy