Call for Papers

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With the commercialization of 5G, early explorations of the game-changing 6G concept have been initiated by a collection of countries, which is expected to facilitate a plethora of future data applications like extended reality (XR), digital twins, autonomous driving, smart home, etc. These cutting-edge services induce unprecedented demands on data rate, energy consumption, mobility, and positioning accuracy. For instance, 6G is envisioned to attain 50 times’ peak rate and 20 times’ sensing accuracy enhancements over existing 5G. However, it seems to be rather challenging to achieve these goals with traditional microwave frequencies and mature modulation formats like OFDM/SC-FDE.

Against this background, there have been preliminary efforts on the emerging modulation techniques from the physical-layer perspective, which aim to fulfill the requirements of different performance indicators for 6G networks. For instance, to achieve Tbps data rate level, exploitation of terahertz (THz) frequencies and above can be mandatory under the spectrum scarcity of the microwave counterpart. Despite the ultra-broad bandwidth and high carrier frequency over 100 GHz, the resultant severe path loss, frequency-selective fading, and Doppler shifts (even more pronounced under high mobility) make existing modulation formats no longer suitable. This motivates new modulation designs to enhance the resilience to harsh channel conditions, e.g., orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), orthogonal delay-Doppler division multiplexing (ODDM), orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM), and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM). Besides, new modulation schemes have been highlighted to fully utilize the communication bandwidth with reduced energy consumption levels, such as extremely-large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) and index modulation. Moreover, novel dual-functional waveform design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) can be crucial to support accurate sensing and high-rate transmission in a full-duplex manner, which is a key enabler for next-generation applications like metaverse and robotics. To this end, our Special Issue (SI) will focus on the modulation-related topics for 6G networks that have just begun to attract extensive attention from both academia and industry. Both researchers and engineers are invited to submit their recent research results and innovations.

We seek original work not currently under review by any other journal/magazine/conference. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Emerging modulation schemes resilient to doubly dispersive channels (e.g., OTFS, ODDM, OCDM, AFDM)
• Novel spectrum and energy-efficient modulation schemes for 6G (e.g., index modulation, backscatter communications)
• RIS/metasurface-enabled modulation methodologies
• Advanced ISAC waveform design for 6G
• New waveform design for THz/optical wireless communications
• Modulation schemes for nano-scale communications (e.g., molecular communications)
• Physical-layer security for modulation schemes within 6G
• Theoretical analysis for modulation schemes towards 6G
• AI-based transceiver design for 6G-oriented modulation schemes
• Low-complexity transceiver design for modulation schemes towards 6G
• Hardware implementation, field trials, and standardization of modulation schemes for 6G

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts following the IEEE OJCOMS guidelines. Authors should submit a manuscript trough Manuscript Central.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 31 August 2024
Publication Date: Fourth Quarter 2024

Lead Guest Editor

Miaowen Wen
South China University of Technology, China

Guest Editors

Tianqi Mao
Beijing Institute of Technology, China

Ertugrul Basar
Koc University, Turkey

Gunes Karabulut-Kurt
Polytechnique Montréali, Canada

Zhaocheng Wang
Tsinghua University, China

Naofal Al-Dhahir
The University of Texas at Dallas, USA