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

Interfaces play a crucial role in the Fifth Generation (5G) architecture as they interconnect Network Functions (NFs) to exchange data and services. Certain interfaces are particularly critical because they are involved in the exchange of sensitive data or are exposed externally. To the best of our knowledge, no literature work analyzes the 5G security from a network architecture or interface perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most promising new millennial technologies, having numerous applications in our surrounding environment. The fundamental goal of an IoT system is to ensure effective communication between users and their devices, which is accomplished through the application layer of IoT. For this reason, the security of protocols employed at the IoT application layer are

The effects of transport development on people’s lives are diverse, ranging from economy to tourism, health care, etc. Great progress has been made in this area, which has led to the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) concept. The main objective of this concept is to offer a safer and more comfortable travel experience through making available a vast array of applications, by relying on a

Indoor positioning technology has become undisputedly pervasive in modern society. It can be used for numerous applications in various environments, ranging from agriculture to smart industry. Among the different indoor positioning technologies, the development of the indoor visible light positioning (VLP) system has gained momentum recently thanks to its low cost and centimetre-order accuracy. Moreover

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, vehicles equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities are expected to become

I welcome you to the first issue of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials in 2024. This issue includes 18 papers covering different aspects of communication networks. In particular, these articles survey and tutor various issues in “Wireless Communications”, “Cyber Security”, “IoT and M2M”, “Vehicular and Sensor Communications”, “Internet Technologies”, “Network Virtualization” and “Network

Frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) have attracted extensive attention for suppressing interference and improving channel quality and coverage by selectively transmitting or directionally reflecting electromagnetic waves in a specific frequency range in wireless communication networks. Therefore, FSS technology is considered to be another candidate after intelligent reflective surfaces (IRSs) in the

Communication security has to evolve to a higher plane in the face of the threat from the massive computing power of the emerging quantum computers. Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) constitutes a promising branch of quantum communication, which is provably secure and overcomes the threat of quantum computing, whilst conveying secret messages directly via the quantum channel. In this survey

Deep learning shows immense potential for strengthening the cyber-resilience of renewable energy supply chains. However, research gaps in comprehensive benchmarks, real-world model evaluations, and data generation tailored to the renewable domain persist. This study explores applying state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to secure renewable supply chains, drawing insights from over 300 publications

Sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication networks are expected to have dense infrastructures, large antenna size, wide bandwidth, cost-effective hardware, diversified positioning methods, and enhanced intelligence. Such trends bring both new challenges and opportunities for the practical design of 6G. On one hand, acquiring channel state information (CSI) in real time for all wireless links becomes

Security at the physical layer (PHY) is a salient research topic in wireless systems, and machine learning (ML) is emerging as a powerful tool for providing new data-driven security solutions. Therefore, the application of ML techniques to the PHY security is of crucial importance in the landscape of more and more data-driven wireless services. In this context, we first summarize the family of bespoke

Due to the greatly improved capabilities of devices, massive data, and increasing concern about data privacy, Federated Learning (FL) has been increasingly considered for applications to wireless communication networks (WCNs). Wireless FL (WFL) is a distributed method of training a global deep learning model in which a large number of participants each train a local model on their training datasets

With the development of quantum technologies, the quantum Internet has demonstrated unique applications beyond the classical Internet and has been investigated extensively in recent years. In the construction of conventional Internet software, the protocol stack is the core architecture for coordinating modules. How to design a protocol stack for the quantum Internet is a challenging problem. In this