5G Technology for Internet of Things

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, we have seen a significant surge in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services across different industry verticals, including the healthcare, manufacturing, and automotive industries. These applications have different requirements, such as, e.g., for bandwidth, latency, reliability, and energy, that the current mobile networks cannot fully accommodate given the way they are built and operated. Thus, 5G technology represents an auspicious solution to the ever-growing user demands as it endorses a new architecture, called Open-RAN (O-RAN), that provides flexible and programmable network infrastructure that can be tailored to the specific needs of every application. It also implements artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques across different layers, i.e., the Radio Access Network (RAN) and Core, to enhance network management and energy efficiency. Although efforts have been devoted lately to the study and enhancement of the performance of the O-RAN architecture, several open issues need to be addressed, including service and resource management, energy consumption, security, and standardisation. As a result, this Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and experimental research to help shape the future development and deployment of Open-RAN-enabled IoT systems. Prospective authors are invited to submit original contributions in areas including, but not limited to, the following:

• Novel 5G-enabled IoT frameworks;
• O-RAN deployments for IoT use cases and applications;
• Discovery algorithms of devices and services in 5G-enabled IoT systems;
• Device search algorithms for 5G-enabled IoT systems;
• Blockchain-enabled 5G-based IoT systems;
• Intelligent devices for 5G security;
• Optimisation algorithms for O-RAN resource allocation;
• Interference mitigation algorithms for O-RAN;
• Machine learning techniques for efficient energy consumption in 5G-enabled IoT systems;
• RAN intelligent controllers;
• Design, implementation, and evaluation of xApps, rApps, and dApps for O-RAN;
• Machine learning techniques to enhance O-RAN security;
• Conflict mitigation in O-RAN networks;
• O-RAN testbeds and trials;
• IoT in the 6th

Dr. Mohammed Amine Togou
Guest Editor

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• 5th generation cellular communications
• Internet of Things
• open-RAN
• intelligent devices
• performance optimisation
• energy efficiency