Editorial: Emerging Technologies for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Infrastructures
Editorial: Emerging Technologies for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Infrastructures
Luca De Nardis 0 1 2
Marina Petrova 0 1 2
0 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany
1 DIET Department, Sapienza University of Rome , Rome , Italy
2 Marina Petrova is an assistant professor at the Faculty of E l ec t r i ca l En g i n e e r i n g a n d I n f o r m a t i o n Te c h n o l o gy at RWTH Aachen University. The professorship is associated with the UMIC research center. She is also a chief research scientist at t h e I n s t i t u t e f o r N e t w o r k Systems. Her research interests are focused on cognitive radios and cognitive wireless networks, adaptive wireless systems tech- nologies and resource optimiza- tion problems in wireless net- works. Dr. Petrova has actively participated in a number of EU funded international cooperative projects and industry projects in the field of wireless communications and cognitive radios. Moreover, she is also involved in research activities towards prototype implementation of re- source management solutions for cognitive radios. Dr. Petrova holds a degree in electrical engineering and telecommunications from University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia and a Ph.D from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She has served in technical program com- mittees of numerous IEEE conferences and workshops. She was a TPC- co chair of DySPAN 2011
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Editorial:
The increasing degree of intelligence, context awareness
and interactivity in everyday objects and appliances is rapidly
moving the concept of smart environments from labs and
research papers out to the real world: application scenarios like
Smart Cities, Smart Mobility, Smart Home are indeed driving
the research activities in the field of wireless communications.
Although a pervasive deployment of connected devices,
capable of bringing to life the Internet of Things vision, is indeed a
cornerstone in the embodiment of smart environments, bare
connectivity is only one piece of the puzzle: technical
advancements and scientific breakthroughs are still required in
several areas. Fast, reliable communications in scenarios
characterized by extremely high density of devices, thanks to
advanced signal processing algorithms for physical layer and
robust and flexible protocols for MAC and network layers,
is definitely a major research topic relevant to smart
environments, as shown by thriving activities on 5th generation
wireless systems. Energy efficiency is a second key aspect that is
under heavy scrutiny by the research community, given the
strict requirements on lifetime and electromagnetic footprint
that will be imposed to devices. Algorithms and protocols
supporting the collection of information about the users and
their interaction with the environment, e.g. their position, are
also expected to play a key role in enabling smart interactions.
Finally, security is an open issue that calls for extensive
analysis and new proposals at all layers of the protocol stack,
given the personal nature of interaction between the user and
the environment, and the corresponding sensitivity of the data
being collected and exchanged.
The six selected papers forming this special issue addressed
aspects related to the topics identified above. The first article,
BJoint Atomic Norm based Estimation of Sparse Time
Dispersive SIMO Channels with Common Support in Pilot
Aided OFDM Systems^, proposed a new channel estimation
method for OFDM wireless systems equipped with multiple
antennas, considering both the case in which multiple
antennas are only available at the receiver (SIMO) and the more
general MIMO case where multiple antennas are available at
both sides. The approach proposed in the paper takes
advantage of atomic norm minimization and outperforms existing
algorithms in low-to-medium SNR regimes.
The second article, titled BPerformance Evaluation of
Nonprefiltering vs. Time Reversal prefiltering in distributed and
uncoordinated IR-UWB Ad-Hoc networks,^ focuses on
another transmission technique that is expected to play a
significant role in future wireless systems, that is Ultra Wide Band
(UWB), and considers its combination with the Time Reversal
(TR) precoding technique. The paper analyzes the
performance of TR-UWB systems in a distributed network of
uncoordinated devices, and identifies under which scenarios
TRUWB can lead to a performance increase when compared to
traditional rake receivers.
The next article, with the title BAnalysis of Two-Tier
LTE network with Randomized Resource Allocation and
Proactive Offloading^, moved up the protocol stack by
addressing the issue of optimal resource allocation in a
heterogeneous network composed of multiple tiers, a
scenario that is expected to play a key role in 5G
systems. The authors studied a two-tier network, and
proposed both a novel radio resource management scheme
at the lower tier and a novel offloading scheme to move
traffic f (...truncated)