Fog Radio Access Networks (F-RANs) for 5G: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Submission Deadline: 15 February 2019

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Fog Radio Access Networks (F-RANs) for 5G: Recent Advances and Future Trends.

To satisfy the explosively increasing demands of high-speed data applications and massive access requirements of various Internet-of-thing (IoT) devices, a whole package of performance requirements has been proposed for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system. In particular, 5G should be able to connect one million connections per square kilometer, and the system capacity will grow by a factor of 1000 compared to the fourth-generation (4G) system to deliver a consistent experience across a variety of scenarios.

Motivated by the necessity of network architecture enhancement, a paradigm of fog radio access networks (F-RANs) has emerged as a promising evolution path for 5G network architecture. In F-RANs, a fog-computing layer is formed at the edge of networks, and a part of the service requirements can be responded to locally without interacting with the cloud computing center via the fronthaul links. Therefore, by taking full advantage of distributed caching and centralized processing, F-RANs provide great flexibility to satisfy quality-of-service requirements of various 5G scenarios. F-RAN has become a research hotspot, and draws a lot of attention from both academia and industry. As it integrates with artificial intelligence and other new emerging technologies, 5G faces new challenges, and the study of F-RANs is entering a new era as well.

This Special Section in IEEE Access will focus on the state-of-art protocols, techniques and applications of F-RANs in the typical scenarios of 5G. The aim of this Special Section is to share and discuss recent advances and future trends of F-RANs, and to bring academic researchers and industry developers together.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Information-theoretic analysis for F-RANs
  • Network architecture and protocol design for 5G F-RANs
  • Computing, communication, caching, and control (4C) for F-RANs
  • Advanced PHY and MAC technologies for F-RANs
  • Resource management and cross-layer design for F-RANs
  • Fronthaul/backhaul design for F-RANs
  • Software defined F-RANs and network slicing for 5G
  • Network security for F-RANs
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled F-RANs
  • Prototype and test-bed for F-RANs

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

 

Associate Editor: Mugen Peng, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China


Guest Editors:

  1. Zhongyuan Zhao, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
  2. Q. S. Quek, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
  3. Guoqiang Mao, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
  4. Zhiguo Ding, The University of Manchester, UK
  5. Chonggang Wang, InterDigital Communications, USA

 

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Future Networks: Architectures, Protocols, and Applications
  2. Mobile Edge Computing
  3. Social Computing Applications for Smart Cities


IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief:
Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: pmg@bupt.edu.cn.