I welcome you to the third issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2024. This issue includes 19 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications”, “Cyber Security”, “Network Virtualization”, “Vehicular and Sensor Communications”, “Multimedia Communications”, “Network and Service Management

In this survey paper, we first provide insights on the evolution of radio access networks (RANs) through investigating the existing paradigms and future trends towards 6G. We then present the fully-decoupled RAN (FD-RAN), which aligns with the trends by integrating existing paradigms and introducing new features such as physical decoupling of uplink and downlink base stations. We also discuss the key

The growing interest in the Metaverse has generated momentum for members of academia and industry to innovate toward realizing the Metaverse world. The Metaverse is a unique, continuous, and shared virtual world where humans embody a digital form within an online platform. Through a digital avatar, Metaverse users should have a perceptual presence within the environment and can interact and control

Autonomous vehicles and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have started to become a reality in recent years. However, shortcomings of these early intelligent vehicles demonstrate a need to increase an intelligent vehicle’s perceptual bubble beyond the vehicle’s onboard sensors. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications is a technology intended to enable intelligent vehicles to increase their perceptive

The digital transformation within the automotive industry is accelerating towards an era dominated by autonomous vehicles, with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications being a fundamental enabler for this advancement. As vehicular networks evolve to meet the complex demands of autonomous driving, traditional communication systems encounter limitations in bandwidth and data transfer rates. Millimeter-wave

Home networks increasingly support important networked applications with limited professional network administration support, while sophisticated attacks pose enormous security risks for networked applications. A Unified Threat Management (UTM) system strives to comprehensively protect a home network by providing firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, as well as antibot protection in an integrated

In this tutorial we present recipes for dynamic systemlevel simulations (SLSs) of 5G and beyond cellular radio systems. A key ingredient for such SLSs is selection of proper models to make sure that the performance determining effects are properly reflected to ensure output of realistic radio performance results. We therefore present a significant number of SLS models and related methodologies for

In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art of resource allocation for power line communication systems. The study systematically presents the advancements achieved in this field over the past decades. To achieve this, we adopt two complementary perspectives: a power line communication-centric view and an optimization-centric view. The former highlights resource allocation within the eye

Despite the great success of blockchain systems in recent years, blockchains still struggle to provide the same level of latency and throughput as centralized financial systems. The core of this problem lies in the inefficiency of consensus protocols. In this paper, we provide a survey on recent efforts to improve the scalability of blockchains. We focus on layer-two protocols, such as payment channel

Modern interactive and data-intensive applications must operate under demanding time constraints, prompting a shift toward the adoption of specialized software and hardware network acceleration technologies. This specialization, however, poses significant scalability, flexibility, security, and economic sustainability challenges for application developers. Cloud computing holds the potential to overcome