ALBERT

Description: The December page is devoted to IEEE Communications Society Awards and the Awards Committee that receives the nominations and processes them to identify the recipients. ComSoc Awards are meant to honor colleagues who in some ways, either via scientific/technical contributions or exemplary services, have reached significant, widely recognized achievements in our telecommunications community. Owing to their high significance and value, they need to be awarded through a fair and transparent process, and this is the essential, yet difficult and heavy task of the Awards Committee. It is my pleasure to introduce Lajos Hanzo, the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Awards Committee, who will describe the awards and the procedure followed by the Awards Committee.

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the publication.

Description: Cellular phone networks are often paralyzed after a disaster, as damage to fixed infrastructure, loss of power, and increased demand degrade coverage and quality of service. To ensure disaster victims and first responders have access to reliable local and global communication, we propose EmergeNet, a portable, rapidly deployable, small-scale cellular network. In this article, we describe EmergeNet, which addresses the challenges of emergency and disaster areas. EmergeNet provides free voice calling and text messaging within a disaster area, and enables users of unmodified GSM handsets to communicate with the outside world using the Skype VoIP network. We evaluate EmergeNet???s ability to provide robust service despite high load, limited bandwidth, and software or hardware failures. EmergeNet is uniquely well suited to providing reliable, fairly allocated voice and text communication in emergency and disaster scenarios.

Description: A wireless sensor network is liable to suffer faults for several reasons, which include faulty nodes or even the fact that nodes have been destroyed by a natural disaster, such as a flood. These faults can give rise to serious problems if WSNs do not have a reconfiguration mechanism at execution. It should be noted that many WSNs designed to detect natural disasters are deployed in inhospitable places and depend on multihop communication to allow the data to reach a sink node. As a result, a fault in a single node can leave a part of the system inoperable until the node recovers from this failure. In light of this, this article outlines a solution that entails employing unmanned aerial vehicles to reduce the problems arising from faults in a sensor network when monitoring natural disasters like floods and landslides. In the solution put forward, UAVs can be transported to the site of the disaster to mitigate problems caused by faults (e.g., by serving as routers or even acting as a data mule). Experiments conducted with real UAVs and with our WSN-based prototype for flood detection (already deployed in S??o Carlos, State of S??o Paulo, Brazil, have proven that this is a viable approach.

Description: The last 15 years have heralded many developments and advances in consumer communications, from early developments of device-specific challenges in interoperability and configuration that are well captured by the concept of plug and play to a more recent emphasis on mobility and service personalization. The one constant technical challenge, and to a great extent a business success, is home networking in its many forms. There is not a modern home without some variant of a set-top box. The three articles in this issue provide a good overview of current and topical requirements in consumer communications.

Description: With the ratification of the IEEE 802.11ad amendment to the 802.11 standard in December 2012, a major step has been taken to bring consumer wireless communication to the millimeter wave band. However, multi-gigabit-per-second throughput and small interference footprint come at the price of adverse signal propagation characteristics, and require a fundamental rethinking of Wi-Fi communication principles. This article describes the design assumptions taken into consideration for the IEEE 802.11ad standard and the novel techniques defined to overcome the challenges of mm-Wave communication. In particular, we study the transition from omnidirectional to highly directional communication and its impact on the design of IEEE 802.11ad.

Description: Although it performs an increasingly important role in our lives, the home network remains a bit of a mystery when end users wish to know what is ???happening on the inside.??? This article introduces Homenet3D, an open source project that allows users to view their home network???s state as objects in 3D space within a web browser window. Homenet3D maps quantitative state to the shape, size, spin, bounce, and/or color of selected objects to qualitatively communicate what is happening on the network. We describe our Homenet3D implementation for routers running OpenWRT, and discuss the potential for visualizing multirouter/ multi-subnet home networks.

Description: Millimeter-wave communication is one way to alleviate the spectrum gridlock at lower frequencies while simultaneously providing high-bandwidth communication channels. MmWave makes use of MIMO through large antenna arrays at both the base station and the mobile station to provide sufficient received signal power. This article explains how beamforming and precoding are different in MIMO mmWave systems than in their lower-frequency counterparts, due to different hardware constraints and channel characteristics. Two potential architectures are reviewed: hybrid analog/digital precoding/combining and combining with low-resolution analog- to-digital converters. The potential gains and design challenges for these strategies are discussed, and future research directions are highlighted.

Description: Virtual traffic lights (VTL) is a new technology that holds the promise of revolutionizing traffic control in urban areas. The original VTL idea was based on 100 percent penetration of VTL technology. In this article, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is shown that 100 percent penetration is not a necessary condition for deploying VTL technology as it can be implemented with partial or low levels of penetration. Furthermore, based on game-theoretic arguments, it is shown that the adoption of VTL technology can be accelerated by providing incentives to vehicles equipped with VTL technology.

Description: Cognitive radio technology allows the reuse of the underutilized frequency spectrum on an opportunistic and non-interfering basis by means of introducing, besides the legitimate primary users of the spectrum, a new kind of users called cognitive or secondary users. Thus, reliable spectrum sensing is critical to dynamically detect available licensed frequency bands and mitigate the primary signals, but it remains realistically difficult to carry out. In fact, although distributed collaborative sensing has turned out to be fruitful for the cognitive radio environment, its accuracy is often affected by the selfish and autonomous behavior of users. In this article, we model distributed spectrum sensing and channel allocation as a non-cooperative game, and apply the minority game to bring forth and study the cooperative behavior of users. The novelty brought by our study consists of alleviating the number of users contending for primary channels by giving them the opportunity to choose between the two, either sensing the channel or being inactive during the time slot. To address the trade-off faced by the SUs, we evaluate the performance of two secondary systems in a green communications context: energy consumption and transmission delay.

Description: In this 14th issue of the Automotive Networking and Applications Series, we are pleased to present three articles that address ??? Release 1 of the cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) standards in Europe ??? The implementation of a virtual traffic lights application with only partial market penetration ??? The usage of multihop wireless communications for intra-car sensor networking By timely information exchanges among vehicles, and between vehicles and roadway infrastructure, vehicles can transform from autonomous systems into cooperative systems, thereby enabling applications such as active road safety and traffic efficiency. Cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) standards are crucial to achieve interoperability among communications equipment made by different manufacturers for vehicles and roadway infrastructure. Release 1 of the C-ITS standards was completed in early 2014, and it covers base standards for ITS-G5 radio (also named wireless access in vehicular environment, or WAVE, in the United States), ad hoc networking and transport with GeoNetworking and Basic Transport Protocol (BTP), the facilities layer such as messaging protocols CAM and DENM, security, privacy and requirements for applications, among others. The first article, "Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems Standards in Europe" by A. Festag, provides a comprehensive overview of release 1 of the C-ITS standards in Europe. The article first gives a brief overview of the C-ITS core standards set and compares it with the U.S. dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) standards in IEEE 1609 and SAE J2735. The author then provides more detailed overviews of the Release 1 C-ITS standards covering the access layer, the networking and transport layers, the facilities layer, and applications, security, and management in the subsequent sections of the article. The article concludes with a brief outlook on the expected C-ITS corridor pilots in Europe starting in 2015, as well- as future standardization directions.

Description: A review of a number of ongoing SDN standardization and open-source activities, this article also discusses the interactions both actual and potential in various standards bodies.

Description: I am honored to have been given the opportunity to initiate this supplement on Communications Standards. It is clear to me that standards enable the global market place to offer interoperable products and services at affordable cost. Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) bring together stake holders to develop consensus standards for use by a global industry. The importance of standards to the work and careers of communications practitioners motivated the creation of this publication on standards. This new quarterly publication will be incubated as a Communication Standards Supplement to IEEE Communications Magazine, which if successful, may transition into a new magazine. It is a platform for presenting and discussing standards-related topics in the areas of communications, networking, and related disciplines.

Description: As I serve the remaining days of my tenure as the president of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), I ponder the future of technology: what's been achieved today and where would this amazing world be without standards?

Description: As Vice President of Standards Activities of the IEEE Communications Society, I want to welcome you to the first issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine supplement on Communications Standards. This supplement is the culmination of the efforts of many people to create a publication that serves the interests of the members of the global standards community who develop, use, or are otherwise interested in communications and networking standards. The aim of this publication is to cover a broad spectrum of communications and networking standards as well as standards-related disciplines, including innovation and standardization theory and methodologies, standards-related research, and standards regulations, as well as the intellectual property and socio-economic aspects of standards.

Description: Self-Organizing Networks (SON) is a common term for mobile network automation, critical to the cost-efficient deployment, operation and maintenance of mobile networks. This article provides an overview of SON standardization in 3GPP, including both existing and planned functionalities. It also provides an operator perspective on the relevance and use of 3GPP SON functionalities at different stages of the network design-and-operations cycle. In the long-term it is envisaged that automation will become a natural component in network operations, although the success of SON will depend on automation???s benefits in relation to its cost.

Description: An ever-growing demand for pervasive Internet access has boosted the deployment of wireless local networks in recent decades. Nevertheless, wireless technologies face performance limitations due to unstable propagation conditions and mobility of devices. In face of multi-path propagation and low-data-rate stations, cooperative relaying promises gains in performance and reliability. However, cooperation procedures are unstable, due to their dependence on current channel conditions, and introduce overhead that can endanger performance, especially when nodes are mobile. This article presents an introduction to cooperative relaying, and describes a novel link layer protocol, called RelaySpot, able to implement cooperative relaying in dynamic networks, based on opportunistic relay selection, cooperative relay scheduling, and switching.

Description: Social networking applications have gained huge popularity. With the widespread use of smart devices (e.g., on-board units, smartphones), these social networks are increasingly going mobile. As a result, a new trend of networking has emerged, referred to as vehicular social networking (VSN), which combines the wireless communications between vehicles with their social relationships. In a broader view, VSNs are social networks formed on roadways by users who have social relationships, interactions, and common interests. The exploitation of vehicular users??? social properties provides better networking and social support to innovative applications and services. This article overviews recent achievements in VSN by providing an organized view of existing approaches. Its contribution lies in a taxonomy for content dissemination approaches in the context of VSN. Also, a framework is outlined to tackle a major new challenge: supporting user satisfaction. Finally, this article emphasizes open research and future trends.

Description: The following two books are reviewed: IPV6 Deployment and Management (Michael Dooley and Timothy Rooney;2013); Flow networks: Analysis, and Optimization of repairable flow networks, with disturbed flow, static flow networks and reliability networks (Michael T. Todinov;2013).

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the publication.

Description: The IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) is one of 45 technical societies and councils that provide the foundation for the IEEE???s broad range of technical, professional, and humanitarian activities. These societies and councils are also part of a much broader, higher-level framework that includes Organizational Units (OUs) such as Member and Geographic Activities, Standards Activities, Educational Activities, etc. ComSoc and the extensive IEEE organization offer a wide range of valuable products and services to their members and the broader, global community. To succeed in fulfilling its mission, it is important that ComSoc recognize the wider IEEE landscape, and avoid "silo" thinking. This month's column, shared with Doug Zuckerman, provides perspectives on how the activities of ComSoc and its parent IEEE go hand in hand to enhance the value offered to IEEE and Society members by being, "One for All and All for One!"

Description: Following the opening article by Prof. Andrea Goldsmith (former ETC chair), published in IEEE Communication Magazine in the December 2013 issue, I am very pleased to write the second edition of this column to further promote emerging technologies in the broad field of communications and related areas.

Description: This article introduces new methods for evaluating and improving resilience of network connectivity to attacks on nodes of the network. Network connectivity is evaluated using a centrality measure that quantifies sensitivity of the size of the largest connected component to node removals. Based on this centrality measure, a new method for improving resilience is introduced, called edge rewiring. The topology of the power grid of western U.S. states is used to illustrate the proposed method. Using the proposed centrality measure, we show that the power grid topology is especially vulnerable to nodal attacks. In particular, using the proposed centrality measure, an attacker could reduce the largest component size by nearly a factor of two by only targeting 0.2 percent of the nodes. More importantly, we show that network resilience can be greatly improved via a few edge rewires without introducing additional edges in the network.

Description: Wi-Fi systems have been continuously evolving to provide a 10-fold increase in data rates every five years, exploiting higher frequencies and larger bandwidths. With each evolution, there has been an improvement in power efficiency along with data rates. This power efficiency improvement is becoming harder to sustain with increasing data rates, and power efficiency is suggested in this article as the next big challenge for multi-gigabit-per-second Wi-Fi systems. The impact of increased bandwidth on the baseband, mixed-signal, and RF design of Wi-Fi systems is studied. A low-power architecture suitable for large-bandwidth Wi-Fi systems is proposed to address the power efficiency challenge. This architecture scales with bandwidth and adapts bandwidth to the data rate requirements.

Description: Provides a listing of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Description: IEEE GLOBECOM 2013, the premier international event held from December 9 - 13 in Atlanta, Georgia, highlighted its 56th annual conference with the presentation of more than 1,500 technical papers, keynotes, business panels and industry forums dedicated to next wave communications and the newest advancements in cloud computing, Big Data and 5G technologies.

Description: Against the backdrop of what many describe as the world's "Most Liveable City," the IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) held its 4th annual event in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Description: 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.

Description: It is an honor and a great responsibility to be, for the years 2014-2015, the 22nd President of the IEEE Communications Society, which will reach in 2014 its 62nd anniversary. In this role, I will succeed a series of distinguished colleagues who have contributed in many ways to the growth and welfare of our society.

Description: We consider a pragmatic multi-layer capacity planning approach for an IP over optical network, which builds on existing planning practices. We first describe a router bypass process that considers the real impact of the IP layer topology change, given the actual behavior of the IP layer, leveraging a commercial IP planning tool. We then consider the design and cost impact of several multi-layer restoration schemes. We compute the savings achieved on two real-world core network models. The resulting savings are similar for both networks and are very promising.

Description: Flexgrid technology has recently been presented as the most promising option for upgrading the currently operating fixed grid optical networks and extending their capacity to be able to deal with the massive traffic volumes forecast for the next decade. Although the current traffic is successfully supported on fixed grid networks, flexgrid technology brings features that are not offered by the fixed grid networks, such as transporting optical connections with a capacity beyond 100 Gb/s and elasticity against time-varying traffic. In light of this, a gradual fixed grid to flexgrid migration is generally accepted in order to add these useful features to the network. In this article, we study the migration process where flexgrid is deployed in the network progressively, and review the main drivers and open issues induced by its deployment.

Description: Current transport networks are statically configured and managed, because they experience a rather limited traffic dynamicity. As a result, long planning cycles are used to upgrade the network and prepare it for the next planning period. Aimed at guaranteeing that the network can support the forecast traffic and deal with failure scenarios, spare capacity is usually installed, thus increasing network expenditures. Moreover, results from network capacity planning are manually deployed in the network, which limits the network agility. In this article, we propose a control and management architecture to allow the network to be dynamically operated. Employing those dynamicity capabilities, the network can be reconfigured and reoptimized in response to traffic changes in an automatic fashion; hence, the resource overprovisioning can be minimized and overall network costs reduced.

Description: 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.

Description: Social networking concepts have been applied to several communication network settings, which span from delay-tolerant to peer-to-peer networks. More recently, one can observe a flourish of proposals aimed at giving social-like capabilities to the objects in the Internet of Things. Such proposals address the design of conceptual (and software) platforms, which can be exploited to easily develop and implement complex applications that require direct interactions among objects. The major goal is to build techniques that allow the network to enhance the level of trust between objects that are "friends" with each other. Furthermore, a social paradigm could definitely guarantee network navigability even if the number of nodes becomes orders of magnitude higher than in the traditional Internet. Objectives of this article are to analyze the major opportunities arising from the integration of social networking concepts into the Internet of Things, present the major ongoing research activities, and point out the most critical technical challenges.

Description: The 5th anniversary edition of RNDM 2013 International Workshop on Reliable Networks Design and Modeling was organized on September 10-12, 2013 in Almaty, Kazakhstan by Prof. Jacek Rak from Gdansk University of Technology, Poland in co-operation with Prof. Hussein Mouftah from Ottawa University, Canada, and Prof. WenDe Zhong from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Description: We are only starting to understand how people behave when they are part of a crowd. This article presents a novel approach to the study and management of crowds. The approach comprises a device to be worn by individuals, an infrastructure to collect the information from the devices, a set of algorithms for recognizing crowd dynamics, and a set of feedback strategies to intervene in the crowd. A fundamental element of our approach is to consider crowds in terms of their texture. The crowd texture is represented through the proximity graph, a data structure that captures the spatial closeness relationship between individuals over time. We address its properties and limitations, a system architecture to measure and process it, and a few examples of insights that can be obtained from analyzing it.

Description: Timely communication in wireless multihop sensor networks requires high throughput and low delay, which can be achieved by exploiting multiple channels and time slots. Efficient scheduling becomes indispensable if multiple channels and time slots are utilized. Optimum scheduling of multiple channels and time slots in multihop networks is an NP-complete problem. We apply metaheuristic approaches to solve the scheduling problem because of the fact that not only the global solution but near-optimal solutions can satisfy a given end-to-end delay bound. We adopt simulated annealing (SA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to schedule the resources. Different measures and stopping conditions are explored to validate the feasibility of scheduling via SA and PSO, and to compare the performance of the two metaheuristics in satisfying the desired end-to-end delay. Although the purpose of this article is to compare SA and PSO, the simulation results demonstrate that PSO-based scheduling outperforms SA-based scheduling in terms of end-to-end delay.

Description: This is the 16th issue of the series on Network and Service Management, which is typically published twice a year, from 2014 in January and July. In recent years it was published in July and December, but the December 2013 issue moved to January 2014 for "symmetry," with a six-month interval between the two issues in the future. The series provides articles on the latest developments in this well-established discipline, highlighting recent research achievements and providing insight into both theoretical and practical issues related to the evolution of the discipline from different perspectives. The series provides a forum for the publication of both academic and industrial research, addressing the state of the art, theory and practice in network and service management.

Description: Network planning is undergoing major changes in terms of the technologies considered and the methodologies. The papers we received for this special issue actually testify to these changes and show the manifold advances made in the area. As the networking industry becomes increasingly cost competitive, planning becomes ever more important, and the articles in the feature topic are particularly timely.

Description: Smartphone-based crowdsourcing fosters the rise of radically novel systems and applications in the context of network monitoring. This article discusses the most significant opportunities offered by this approach, and the major challenges that have to be faced. Our experience in building a smartphone-based crowdsourcing system, Portolan, is also included to provide a practical background to the discussion and to demonstrate the possible benefits.

Description: This article proposes a dynamic migration planning methodology for communication networks. Aimed at providing optimal technical performance, the approach takes into account dimensioning of network infrastructure and services, as well as evaluation of revenues and costs. As a result, the migration planning method provides a cost-effective network deployment plan based on an optimal stepwise upgrade strategy. Market information, existing infrastructure, costs, and demand forecasting are then considered in order to determine this strategy by solving a combinatorial optimization problem. It is described theoretically, and a techno-economic evaluation framework is introduced to assess its financial feasibility. The model is a suitable guideline to tackle migration problems commonly solved by using anticipated, single- ,and multi-period planning techniques. Considering a particular example, a study on migration toward fiber to the home is analyzed. Fiber to the cabinet/building architectures are then proposed as possible intermediate steps in the migration path to fiber to the home. Finally, a case study for an existing access network is analyzed.

Description: We discuss the basic algorithmic issues in planning and operating flexible optical networks, highlighting the challenges and differences from fixed-grid WDM networks. We also overview commercially available planning and operation tools, which (expectedly) lack support for flexible optical networks at the moment, as flexible technologies are not yet deployed in real networks. To fill this need we present the Mantis tool. Mantis' modular architecture provides fast running times, efficient and fault-tolerant usage of computation resources, and execution as both a desktop application and a cloud software-as-a-service.

Description: The Internet was originally designed as a best effort packet forwarding substrate. However, since its inception, its purpose has shifted toward a rich service-centric delivery platform. Its underlying infrastructure as well as the number of connected devices have taken on immense proportions, and sharing of capabilities has come into widespread use. Moreover, the Internet??s services are becoming increasingly interactive, context-aware, and content-oriented. This has led to stringent delivery requirements being imposed on the underlying infrastructure. Despite these evolutions, management of the Internet has not evolved significantly. It remains largely static and is unable to provide dynamic end-to-end service delivery guarantees in a costeffective manner. In this article, we propose the Fluid Internet, a novel paradigm aimed at tackling these management challenges. The Fluid Internet seamlessly provisions virtualized infrastructure capabilities, adapting the delivery substrate to the dynamic requirements of services and users, much like a fluid adapting to fit its surroundings. As such, the Fluid Internet gives a service provider the ability to manage its services end to end and elastically. Our vision is achieved through a unification of concepts from network virtualization, cloud computing, and service-centric networking. The relevant stakeholders, as well as their functions and interactions, are described. Additionally, we identify the major technical challenges that remain to be tackled for the Fluid Internet vision to become a reality.

Description: The need for better adaptation of networks to transported flows has led to research on new approaches such as content aware networks and network aware applications. In parallel, recent developments of multimedia and content oriented services and applications such as IPTV, video streaming, video on demand, and Internet TV reinforced interest in multicast technologies. IP multicast has not been widely deployed due to interdomain and QoS support problems; therefore, alternative solutions have been investigated. This article proposes a management driven hybrid multicast solution that is multi-domain and media oriented, and combines overlay multicast, IP multicast, and P2P. The architecture is developed in a content aware network and network aware application environment, based on light network virtualization. The multicast trees can be seen as parallel virtual content aware networks, spanning a single or multiple IP domains, customized to the type of content to be transported while fulfilling the quality of service requirements of the service provider.

Description: As mobile Internet applications supporting real-time communications services are pervasively used, traffic patterns in mobile networks have changed significantly. New mobile Internet applications differ from traditional applications such as web browser and FTP in that they need always-on connectivity and generate a large amount of signaling traffic. The traffic patterns of these new mobile applications lead to frequent change of radio resource control states between connected and idle in the user equipment, consuming device battery power and causing excessive signaling overhead. The growth in signaling has resulted in a traffic surge that has attracted the attention of mobile network operators. In this article, we first explore traffic composition in a 3G network and show that chatty applications such as instant messenger and social network services contribute to the frequent change of radio states. We then describe the mechanism behind the surge in signaling traffic and describe the disastrous outcome when an application server failure and recovery occurs. Lastly, we discuss some remedies to reduce the application signaling traffic and network load in 3G and LTE networks. These remedies include development of network-aware smart applications that consider the mobile network characteristics and introduction of push notification services. We also present related future work and our research directions.

Description: This article presents proposals to improve the security, safety, and management of biometric systems, and the privacy of system users. First, a standard system heartbeat message is proposed for monitoring the safety, security, performance, and availability of distributed telebiometric devices, and for alerting system administrators to security and safety events and changes. Next, an event journal standard is proposed for the collection of data needed to manage the safe and secure operation of telebiometric devices. Third, a cryptographic message schema standard is proposed for the protection of event journals, heartbeat messages, biometric reference templates, and other telebiometric information using digital signature, encryption, and signcryption techniques.

Description: The telecommunications sector has experienced significant changes over the past few years. The advent and rise of new applications and services, together with a competitive market, has led to a complex scenario in which quality of service plays a major role. Under this condition, novel QoS regulation and standardization initiatives are required. During the last few years new terms and concepts, such as quality of experience or QoS perceived, have been included in the updated and new QoS-related standards as to better integrate the user??s point of view, as opposed to only network performance parameters. The influence of the user??s satisfaction on the quality of business has also been given increased attention in the regulation and standardization bodies recently. The result is a loose collection of metrics and models that are not standardized and do not integrate all aspects of quality. Such integration is necessary to assure the successful development of this sector. This paper presents a new and integrated QoS model (QoXphere) that is spherical, adaptive, and multi-layered.

Description: We present the state-of-the-art system level evaluation of the IEEE 802.22-2011 standard using a highly detailed simulator implementation in NS-2. In the evaluation our attention is focused on the effect of spatiotemporal wireless microphone (WM) activity on the performance of the IEEE 802.22-2011 network, while considering novel spectrum sensing strategies and multimedia traffic with different prioritization in IEEE 802.22-2011. Our general finding is that the IEEE 802.22-2011 standard deals well with WMs and prioritization of simultaneous multimedia traffic using different QoS profiles, while some surprising conclusions follow.

Description: From being a scientific curiosity only a few years ago, energy harvesting (EH) is well on its way to becoming a game-changing technology in the field of autonomous wireless networked systems. The promise of long-term, uninterrupted and self-sustainable operation in a diverse array of applications has captured the interest of academia and industry alike. Yet the road to the ultimate network of perpetual communicating devices is plagued with potholes: ambient energy is intermittent and scarce, energy storage capacity is limited, and devices are constrained in size and complexity. In dealing with these challenges, this article will cover recent developments in the design of intelligent energy management policies for EH wireless devices and discuss pressing research questions in this rapidly growing field.

Description: A new era in telecommunications is emerging. Virtualized networking functions and resources will offer network operators a way to shift the balance of expenditure from capital to operational, opening up networks to new and innovative services. This article introduces the concept of edge as a service (EaaS), a means of harnessing the flexibility of virtualized network functions and resources to enable network operators to break the tightly coupled relationship they have with their infrastructure and enable more effective ways of generating revenue. To achieve this vision, we envisage a virtualized service access interface that can be used to programmatically alter access network functions and resources available to service providers in an elastic fashion. EaaS has many technically and economically difficult challenges that must be addressed before it can become a reality; the main challenges are summarized in this article.

Description: Recently, a number of approaches based on dynamic power management techniques have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of telecommunication networks and devices. They are able to optimize the trade-off between network performance and energy requirements. It is possible to execute and extend these techniques to the whole network, by using local control policies together with energy-aware routing and traffic engineering. However, the lack of a standardized representation of the energy-aware capabilities of heterogeneous networking equipment makes their deployment confusing and impractical. To this aim, we have proposed a novel framework, the green abstraction layer (GAL), whose purpose is to define a multi-layered abstraction interface for the hardware and physical resources, where energy management actions are directly performed. Therefore, the GAL syntax can be exposed to the platform-independent logical representation commonly used in network control protocols. Given the internal architectural complexity and heterogeneity of many network devices, the GAL approach is based on a hierarchical decomposition, where each level provides an abstract and aggregated representation of internal components

Description: In this article we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multihop ad hoc networking. This paradigm has often been identified with the solutions developed inside the IETF MANET working group, and for this reason it is called the MANET paradigm. However, they do not coincide, and in the last decade they clearly diverged. In this article, we start from the reasons why the MANET paradigm did not have a major impact on computer communications, and we discuss the evolution of the multihop ad hoc networking paradigm by building on the lessons learned from the MANET research. Specifically, we analyze four successful networking paradigms, mesh, sensor, opportunistic, and vehicular networks, that emerged from the MANET world as a more pragmatic application of the multihop ad hoc networking paradigm. We also present the new research directions in the multihop ad hoc networking field: peoplecentric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications.

Description: Social aspects in communications are becoming more and more important, and this is also reflected in mobile and ad hoc networking. Many of the articles in this issue reflect this ongoing shift in focus.

Description: Important lessons for responding to a largescale disaster can be gleaned from the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. The failure of the electrical power system and the resultant loss of information communication and processing capability severely constrained the recovery work of many municipalities. It was difficult for supporting organizations to collect and share information. A frugal information system designed around the four u-constructs is suggested as a solution for handling the very early stages of disaster relief, typically within the first 72 hours and even upon the realization of an impending disaster. This article focuses on basing communications on the most frequently available device, the cellular phone, as the foundation for a frugal IS for disaster relief. Familiar and available tools place minimal stress on an already strained communication system, and enable effective connection between those impacted by a disaster and those involved in disaster relief.

Description: This Series presents selected papers from the ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference that convened in Kyoto, Japan from the 22nd to 24th of April 2013. The topic of the conference was "Building Sustainable Communities," in recognition of the challenges that Japan is facing after the Great East Earthquake. The hosts were the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC) of Japan and Kyoto University. Kyoto University is the second oldest Japanese national university after the University of Tokyo. It was founded in 1897 following the Meiji Restoration, which adopted various western systems to build a modern state.

Description: Testing networking devices before releasing them onto the market is a way of ensuring quality and robustness. Replaying artificial or realworld traffic is a method to test networking devices. Using real-world traffic is desirable as it uncovers more realistic properties. The challenges of testing with real-world traffic are mainly the high volume of the captured traces and the prolonged time required for replay testing. In order to efficiently reproduce the failures of networking devices and reduce the replay time, it is necessary to reduce the size of the traces that have triggered the failures. In this work, two algorithms used to downsize the traces but still retain the failures they triggered, Binary Downsizing (BD) and Linear Downsizing (LD), are proposed. Meanwhile, a metric called downsizing ratio (DR), the ratio between the size of the downsized traces and that of the original traces, is defined in order to evaluate the efficiency of the trace downsizing. Three kinds of probes following the basic RFC benchmarking requirements, ARP, ICMP, and HTTP requests, are regularly sent to diagnose the devices during the testing. ARP and ICMP probes test the reachability of a networking device hosted on the local network, and HTTP probes check if the device still responds to users?? requests. The evaluation of failure distribution shows that 70 percent of failures happened because they failed to respond to one of the three probes, 23 percent failed to respond to two probes, and 7 percent failed to respond to all probes. From the downsizing experiments, LD was inferred to have a slightly higher DR than that of BD, but BD generally would require fewer iterations than LD.

Description: The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami drastically changed Japanese society, and the requirements for ICT was completely redefined. After the disaster, it was impossible for disaster victims to utilize their communication devices, such as cellular phones, tablet computers, or laptop computers, to notify their families and friends of their safety and confirm the safety of their loved ones since the communication infrastructures were physically damaged or lacked the energy necessary to operate. Due to this drastic event, we have come to realize the importance of device-to-device communications. With the recent increase in popularity of D2D communications, many research works are focusing their attention on a centralized network operated by network operators and neglect the importance of decentralized infrastructureless multihop communication, which is essential for disaster relief applications. In this article, we propose the concept of multihop D2D communication network systems that are applicable to many different wireless technologies, and clarify requirements along with introducing open issues in such systems. The first generation prototype of relay by smartphone can deliver messages using only users' mobile devices, allowing us to send out emergency messages from disconnected areas as well as information sharing among people gathered in evacuation centers. The success of field experiments demonstrates steady advancement toward realizing user-driven networking powered by communication devices independent of operator networks.

Description: As noted in the January message, the President's Pages in February through June 2014 will be devoted to presentations on the five ComSoc Vice Presidents. Each will describe their sector activities and programs for the next two years. The February installment highlights the Technical Activities Vice President, Khaled Ben Letaief.

Description: The industry??s top event for those working in optical communications is closing in on 40. The OFC Conference and Exposition has evolved from its beginnings in 1975 as the Optical Fiber Transmission conference to the largest show of its kind today ?? featuring topics well beyond simple fiber transmission, including cloud and datacenter networking, bandwidth exhaust, virtualization and software-defined networks (SDN), silicon photonics and more. OFC 2014 runs March 9??13 in San Francisco with all new presentations, workshops, panel discussions, networking opportunities, short courses and special events.

Description: Global optical communications industry showed progress in all segments from access to core networks in 2013. Although fiber-based broadband access network deployments were slower than expected with service provider attention focused on recent developments and new technologies for copper- based broadband access, we witnessed steady developments in next generation optical access (NGOA) standards and field trials.

Description: Presents the table of contents for this issue of this magazine.

Description: Presents the front cover for this issue of the magazine.

Description: In the last year or so, significant momentum has started to build around the idea of a fifth generation (5G) for wireless communications technology. New research projects have started internationally, and research centers devoted to 5G technology have begun to open. At the ICC 2013 conference in Budapest, there were a number of keynote talks and special invited sessions addressing some of the key concepts around 5G technology. This Special Issue was created by IEEE Communications Magazine to help readers understand the current perspectives on 5G technology from both industry and academic standpoints.

Description: As the deployment and commercial operation of 4G systems are speeding up, technologists worldwide have begun searching for next generation wireless solutions to meet the anticipated demands in the 2020 era given the explosive growth of mobile Internet. This article presents our perspective of the 5G technologies with two major themes: green and soft. By rethinking the Shannon theorem and traditional cell-centric design, network capacity can be significantly increased while network power consumption is decreased. The feasibility of the combination of green and soft is investigated through five interconnected areas of research: energy efficiency and spectral efficiency co-design, no more cells, rethinking signaling/control, invisible base stations, and full duplex radio.

Description: Mobile services based on 4G LTE services are steadily expanding across global markets, providing subscribers with the type of responsive Internet browsing experience that previously was only possible on wired broadband connections. With more than 200 commercial LTE networks in operation as of August 2013 [1], LTE subscriptions are expected to exceed 1.3 billion by the end of 2018 [2]. LTE??s rapid uptake, based on exponential growth in network data traffic, has opened the industry??s eyes to an important reality: the mobile industry must deliver an economically sustainable capacity and performance growth strategy; one that offers increasingly better coverage and a superior user experience at lower cost than existing wireless systems, including LTE. This strategy will be based on a combination of network topology innovations and new terminal capabilities. Simple network economics also require that the industry??s strategy enable new services, new applications, and ultimately new opportunities to monetize the user experience. To address these pressing requirements, many expert prognosticators are turning their attention to future mobile broadband technologies and standards (i.e., 5G) as well as evolutions of the 3GPP??s existing LTE standard and IEEE 802.11 standards.

Description: This article provides some fundamental indications about wireless communications beyond LTE/LTE-A (5G), representing the key findings of the European research project 5GNOW. We start with identifying the drivers for making the transition to 5G networks. Just to name one, the advent of the Internet of Things and its integration with conventional human-initiated transmissions creates a need for a fundamental system redesign. Then we make clear that the strict paradigm of synchronism and orthogonality as applied in LTE prevents efficiency and scalability. We challenge this paradigm and propose new key PHY layer technology components such as a unified frame structure, multicarrier waveform design including a filtering functionality, sparse signal processing mechanisms, a robustness framework, and transmissions with very short latency. These components enable indeed an efficient and scalable air interface supporting the highly varying set of requirements originating from the 5G drivers.

Description: Provides a notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Description: The following books are reviewed: MIMO Communication for Cellular Networks (Huang, H. et al; 2012); Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Remote Sensing For Security Applications (Nanzer, J.; 2012); Scalability, Density, and Decision Making in Cognitive Wireless Networks (Marshall, P.; 2012); and The Art of the Data Center: A Look Inside the World's Most Innovative and Compelling Computing Environments (Alger, D; 2012).

Description: The IEEE Wireless Communications & Networking Conference (WCNC) has initiated the registration process for its next annual meeting to be held 6-9 April 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. With accommodations currently available at the Istanbul Hilton Hotel, a 3-minute walk from the conference venue the Istanbul Congress Center, and several other hotels nearby, this year's event ties together the numerous cultural, technological and financial center with the next stage of visionary research, services and applications that are actively furthering worldwide business, entertainment and social practices. Scheduled to include more than 850 technical and executive presentations, IEEE WCNC 2014 will open Sunday, 6 April. Still under development and soon to be announced is the IEEE WCNC 2014 business panel and technical program, which will consist of the presentation of hundreds of original papers. All of the papers, which were selected after a rigorous review process that included over 1,300 submissions from over 60 countries, will cover the entire range of wireless communications and networking topics. For more information on IEEE WCNC 2014, including registration and program details as well as ongoing conference updates, please visit www.ieee-wcnc.org/2014.

Description: The fourth generation wireless communication systems have been deployed or are soon to be deployed in many countries. However, with an explosion of wireless mobile devices and services, there are still some challenges that cannot be accommodated even by 4G, such as the spectrum crisis and high energy consumption. Wireless system designers have been facing the continuously increasing demand for high data rates and mobility required by new wireless applications and therefore have started research on fifth generation wireless systems that are expected to be deployed beyond 2020. In this article, we propose a potential cellular architecture that separates indoor and outdoor scenarios, and discuss various promising technologies for 5G wireless communication systems, such as massive MIMO, energy-efficient communications, cognitive radio networks, and visible light communications. Future challenges facing these potential technologies are also discussed.

Description: In 4G cellular networks, both the adaptation of data rates to current interference conditions due to adaptive modulation and coding as well as a frequency reuse of one mandate precise techniques to estimate cell capacities and cell loads in order to accurately predict the quality of service delivered to end users. Such estimation happens ideally already during the network planning phase and is further required for selfoptimization at runtime. Classic flow-level techniques to estimate cell loads, capacities, and related quality of service metrics assume static and worst case interference, which is analytically simple, but may produce considerable errors and lead to disadvantageous planning and optimization results. Appropriate models where individual cells are coupled through interference are rendered analytically intractable. This article first introduces basic flow-level modeling techniques and then reviews recent results in the field of flow-level network models, which allow the actual loads and capacities in interference- coupled wireless networks to be bound and closely approximated. We discuss trade-offs between accuracy and numerical complexity of different techniques and identify a model based on the notion of average interference as the most practically relevant. Simulation results for a large scenario based on a real network illustrate its applicability to practical network planning.

Description: ITU is the oldest intergovernmental and world telecommunication organization and UN specialized agency for telecommunications. Its federal structure is a historic property from those days when the political environment imposed it over any other, possibly more rational model. Together with the Union??s membership segmentation into five (5) politico/geographical zones (in 1947), the ??federalism?? was fixed for several decades. It was a perfect reflection of the emerging new world order as well as defense of strategic national interests. In the 90s, the political environment changed together with the telecommunication environment and the client?? needs ?? the Member States recognized it but it was too early to replace the archaic federalism with a healthy pragmatism! The organizational reforms were put on ??standby.?? With technology convergence and the need for streamlining the creative potential, the federal mechanism has become less appropriate and less responsive. The tension between the political and technical part of the ITU has led to regression of its credibility and loss of preeminence. Some Governments of Member States have noted that they are no more the leading architect of the ICT future. The political wisdom and courage are necessary to review the ITU corporate activities and to open a debate on constitutional changes at the first next Plenipotentiary Conference in 2014 (Busan, Korea). It will be important in the future to preserve a balance of interests contrary to the balance of power. Governments and non-governmental entities ?? sector members ?? should find in ITU "a Forum" where the national telecommunication policies get their international recognition.

Description: The demand for wireless access data rates is growing exponentially at a pace where supply cannot keep up with. Wireless resources (spectrum, time, space) are limited and shared, and transmission rates cannot be improved anymore solely with physical layer innovations. On the consumer side, flat rate type tariffs have established unnecessarily high expectations and often wasteful consumption. Dealing with congestion is unavoidable as a consequence of operating in a regime where demand is close to, equal to, or exceeding the supply. We can no longer assume that the current over-provisioning approach continues to be feasible. Complementary to the engineering for the growth of the supply side, this article focuses on the engineering for the control of the demand side. An approach referred to as the ??user-inthe- loop?? (UIL) is therefore motivated here. This article proposes spatial control, in which the user is encouraged to move to a less congested location, and temporal control, in which incentives (e.g., dynamic pricing) ensure that the user reduces (or postpones) his current data demand in case the network is congested. Results from a survey, which measures how willing a user is to respond to such control, are also presented. As users are modeled by a system-theoretic box in a closed-loop (control) system, they feature an input handle for incentives and an output handle for the reaction. Incentives can be progressive tariffs, reward programs, higher access rates, or even environmental (green) indicators. Incentives are tailored to the major Quality-of-Service (QoS) classes and help to shape the demand at the application layer-7 as well as at the user (??layer-8????). UIL can safely be applied in addition to other technologies, which are mainly for increasing the supplied capacity.

Description: This article proposes a fundamental modeling and optimization framework for the planning of energy-aware wireless networks. The key idea is that in order to produce energy-efficient network operation, energy awareness should be introduced at the planning stage. Cellular as well as mesh wireless examples are considered.

Description: The demand for rich multimedia services over mobile networks has been soaring at a tremendous pace over recent years. However, due to the centralized architecture of current cellular networks, the wireless link capacity as well as the bandwidth of the radio access networks and the backhaul network cannot practically cope with the explosive growth in mobile traffic. Recently, we have observed the emergence of promising mobile content caching and delivery techniques, by which popular contents are cached in the intermediate servers (or middleboxes, gateways, or routers) so that demands from users for the same content can be accommodated easily without duplicate transmissions from remote servers; hence, redundant traffic can be significantly eliminated. In this article, we first study techniques related to caching in current mobile networks, and discuss potential techniques for caching in 5G mobile networks, including evolved packet core network caching and radio access network caching. A novel edge caching scheme based on the concept of content-centric networking or information-centric networking is proposed. Using trace-driven simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme and validate the various advantages of the utilization of caching content in 5G mobile networks. Furthermore, we conclude the article by exploring new relevant opportunities and challenges.

Description: The exponential increase of mobile data traffic requires disrupting approaches for the realization of future 5G systems. In this article, we overview the technologies that will pave the way for a novel cellular architecture that integrates high-data-rate access and backhaul networks based on millimeter-wave frequencies (57??66, 71??76, and 81??86 GHz). We evaluate the feasibility of short- and medium-distance links at these frequencies and analyze the requirements from the transceiver architecture and technology, antennas, and modulation scheme points of view. Technical challenges are discussed, and design options highlighted; finally, a performance evaluation quantifies the benefits of millimeter- wave systems with respect to current cellular technologies.

Description: The millimeter-wave (mmWave) band offers the potential for high-bandwidth communication channels in cellular networks. It is not clear, however, whether both high data rates and coverage in terms of signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio can be achieved in interferencelimited mmWave cellular networks due to the differences in propagation conditions and antenna topologies. This article shows that dense mmWave networks can achieve both higher data rates and comparable coverage relative to conventional microwave networks. Sum rate gains can be achieved using more advanced beamforming techniques that allow multiuser transmission. The insights are derived using a new theoretical network model that incorporates key characteristics of mmWave networks.

Description: This article discusses the challenges, benefits and approaches associated with realizing largescale antenna arrays at mmWave frequency bands for future 5G cellular devices. Key design considerations are investigated to deduce a novel and practical phased array antenna solution operating at 28 GHz with near spherical coverage. The approach is further evolved into a first-of- a-kind cellular phone prototype equipped with mmWave 5G antenna arrays consisting of a total of 32 low-profile antenna elements. Indoor measurements are carried out using the presented prototype to characterize the proposed mmWave antenna system using 16-QAM modulated signals with 27.925 GHz carrier frequency. The biological implications due to the absorbed electromagnetic waves when using mmWave cellular devices are studied and compared in detail with those of 3/4G cellular devices.

Description: Provides a notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Description: Wireless devices running the Android operating system offer a novel opportunity to study network behaviors, and to observe and modify, in real time, key networking parameters. This opens up an unprecedented opportunity to study, test, and evaluate the performance of techniques operating at different layers of the protocol stack and adopting the cognitive networking paradigm. In this article, we describe our novel IEEE 802.11 mesh network testbed that integrates Android-based devices. The aim is to build a flexible testbed to observe in-stack and out-of-stack parameters of interest that, with some modifications, can be used to test networking techniques in both civilian and emergency scenarios. We provide the implementation details to create an ad hoc network among these inexpensive commercial devices, and specify how to observe and modify the networking parameters at different layers of the protocol stack. We also run some standard protocols on the network, and we obtain some repeatable results, which are similar to other results from the literature and confirm our testbed as a valid tool for ad hoc network performance evaluation.

Description: The concept of flow-aware networking (FAN) has been introduced, discussed, and analyzed only with the use of mathematical models or computer simulations. This article presents the results of FAN??s first practical implementation. For the environment, the Click Modular Router was chosen. In the article, vital implementation-related issues are shown and analyzed. The results of post-implementation tests are also presented. They confirm the advantages of the XP router over the IP router. We prove that traffic in FAN is served fairly, and the packets of streaming flows are transmitted with high priority. Moreover, the test results confirm that streaming flows are served with acceptable quality even in highly loaded links, which is not observed in the classic IP network. The tests also show several problems not caught by the simulative studies available in the literature. First of all, to increase efficiency, a flow list had to be implemented in a different way than originally proposed. Also, a queuing algorithm had to be altered to eliminate too frequent changes of flow states, which resulted in a lack of stability. The presented tests ultimately prove that FAN works as a concept and that, by reaching maturity, it is ready for largescale deployment.

Description: Portable wireless devices used in close proximity to the human body have transmitter power constraints that are dictated in part by regulatory limits on a form of electromagnetic exposure called specific absorption rate (SAR). SAR, measured in Watts per kilogram, is a measure of electromagnetic energy absorption by the body, which can cause the heating of tissue. Some portable wireless devices sold today operate near the accepted human SAR limit. This article examines how SAR constraints can be incorporated into wireless signal design for multiple transmitters. A SAR constraint, although related to a power constraint, differs sufficiently that signals designed specifically for the constraint are needed. Although it is well known that multiple transmitters subject only to a power constraint can improve the link performance of a wireless system compared to a single transmitter, it is not clear when the device is also subject to a SAR constraint: how to model the constraint; whether performance advantages still exist; and how to realize any advantages. In this article, we introduce SAR constraints and discuss the SAR measurement, simulation, and modeling process. We then show how to incorporate the SAR constraint into system performance analysis and code design. We show how SAR codes use multiple transmit antennas to get good combined farfield error performance and near-field SAR performance, improving handset transmitter performance in the critical uplink of a communication system.

Description: Wireless radios implementing multiple-antenna or adaptive antenna technologies are pervading LTE and Wi-Fi. These technologies involve some level of interaction with the RF environment, and their dynamic nature means that traditional performance tests that do not adequately reflect the real-world environment will not provide the desired device performance information. In fact, the benefits of some of these approaches can only be tested in an over-the-air environment that reflects an expected use case. This article describes some of the challenges and issues with RF performance tests in a multipleinput multiple-output over-the-air environment, surveys recent approaches used to address these topics, and covers some open areas of current work.

Description: The broad proliferation of mobile devices in recent years has drastically changed the means of accessing the World Wide Web. Describing a shift away from the desktop computer era for content consumption, predictions indicate that the main access of web-based content will come from mobile devices. Concurrently, the manner of content presentation has changed as well; web artifacts are allowing for richer media and higher levels of user interaction which is enabled by the increasing speeds of access networks. This article provides an overview of more than two years of high level web page characteristics by comparing the desktop and mobile client versions. Our study is the first long-term evaluation of differences as seen by desktop and mobile web browser clients. We showcase the main differentiating factors with respect to the number of web page object requests, their sizes, relationships, and web page object caching. We find that over time, initial page view sizes and number of objects increase faster for desktop versions. However, web page objects have similar sizes in both versions, though they exhibit a different composition by type of object in greater detail.

Description: The combination of millimeter-wave communications, arrays with a massive number of antennas, and small cell geometries is a symbiotic convergence of technologies that has the potential to dramatically improve wireless access and throughput. This article outlines the benefits, challenges, and potential solutions associated with cellular networks that incorporate these technologies.

Description: This article presents empirically-based largescale propagation path loss models for fifthgeneration cellular network planning in the millimeter-wave spectrum, based on real-world measurements at 28 GHz and 38 GHz in New York City and Austin, Texas, respectively. We consider industry-standard path loss models used for today??s microwave bands, and modify them to fit the propagation data measured in these millimeter-wave bands for cellular planning. Network simulations with the proposed models using a commercial planning tool show that roughly three times more base stations are required to accommodate 5G networks (cell radii up to 200 m) compared to existing 3G and 4G systems (cell radii of 500 m to 1 km) when performing path loss simulations based on arbitrary pointing angles of directional antennas. However, when directional antennas are pointed in the single best directions at the base station and mobile, coverage range is substantially improved with little increase in interference, thereby reducing the required number of 5G base stations. Capacity gains for random pointing angles are shown to be 20 times greater than today??s fourth-generation Long Term Evolution networks, and can be further improved when using directional antennas pointed in the strongest transmit and receive directions with the help of beam combining techniques.

Description: We present a real-world testbed for research and development in vehicular networking that has been deployed successfully in the seaport of Leix??oes in Portugal. The testbed allows cloudbased code deployment, remote network control and distributed data collection from moving container trucks, cranes, tow boats, patrol vessels, and roadside units, thereby enabling a wide range of experiments and performance analyses. After describing the testbed architecture and its various modes of operation, we give concrete examples of its use and offer insights on how to build effective testbeds for wireless networking with moving vehicles.

Description: Control-plane functions are migrating from dedicated network equipment into software running on commodity hardware. The Software- Defined Access Network (SDAN) concept introduced here extends the benefits of Software- Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) into broadband access. In a SDAN, access-network control and management functions for broadband access are virtualized, to streamline operations, speed services creation, and enhance broadband customer satisfaction, particularly in multi-operator environments. This article examines industry drivers, identifies software- definable control and management functions for broadband access, and presents some specific usage scenarios for the SDAN.

Description: In the world of communications, testing is usually applied to verify an implementation, in terms of functionality, conformance, interoperability, performance, robustness, and stability. The implementation under test could be a black-box or white-box device, a piece of software, or scaled up to a system of hardware and software. This September issue received nine submissions in December 2013. We accepted three of them, with two from academia and one from a hybrid team of universities and a startup company. The other six submissions were not included, mainly due to not enough focus or interesting materials on test methodologies and results, or not enough technical contributions. Again, the due dates for this series are June 1 and December 1 each year, with publication in the March and September issues of the following year. The turn-around time of the review process is being kept within three months, usually with two rounds of review. We continue to solicit submissions with a focus on test methodologies and results in communications and networking systems.

Description: During radio system development, a great deal of attention is paid to new techniques that have emerged in communication science: on increasing bandwidth, operating range, and spectrum utilization; and on creating high-performance hardware and software architectures that are energy efficient, have low weight, and are secure. Developing efficient and effective mobile devices, however, demands more than just new coding methods or pushing channel utilization ever closer to the Shannon limit. For example, such devices need to coexist not just with other devices, but also with the human beings who use them. How are we to increase the number of transmitter chains in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) device without running afoul of exposure limits? RF testing is another often overlooked issue. MIMO devices require a complex RF propagation environment to function properly: multipath is our friend! But the consequence is that modern devices contain lots of permanently integrated antennas that are essential components of the RF chain. How can these devices be adequately tested?

Description: As anticipated in my first message in January, the President's Pages in the February through June issues will be devoted to the presentation of the five ComSoc Vice Presidents, who will describe their sector activities and programs for the next two years. The June issue concerns the Vice President for Standards Activities, Robert S. Fish (Rob).

Description: Dr. George Heilmeier, one of the most influential technology leaders of our era, passed away on April 21 in Plano, Texas at the age of 77. The cause of death was attributed to complications arising from Alzheimer's disease.

Description: In wireless sensor networks, densely deployed and resource-constrained sensor nodes observe their surroundings and communicate the sensed data to the sink. However, those observations are correlated - spatially and temporally. Furthermore, the communicated data, depending on their priority, require differentiated QoS, such as end-to-end delay and jitter. In this work, we use context awareness as a means of sharing information required to control the network, and providing differentiated QoS to the nodes and their transmitted data by exploiting spatial and temporal correlation. Simulation results show that context awareness helps nodes to manage the network in an energy-efficient manner.

Description: new wireless applications such as public safety and social networking have been emerging in recent years. Those applications introduce the necessity of direct communications among devices or peers without core network or wireless routers, which is not well supported in current network infrastructures. While some existing technologies can support certain levels of direct peer-to-peer communications, they are contextoblivious and inefficient. This article proposes a context-aware proximity-based P2P (CA-P2P) wireless communication system architecture to enable context awareness for direct P2P communications. The main idea is to systematically incorporate appropriate context information in direct communication protocols to improve overall performance. One of the major features is application-based communication, which connects peers according to their common applications. Accordingly, radio resources can be managed more efficiently among and within different application groups. Specifically, the scheme proposed in this article includes several new mechanisms such as context-aware peer discovery and context-aware peer association. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed context awareness system achieves fast and efficient peer discovery and peer association in terms of latency and overhead.