Call for Papers

IEEE Open Journal of Communications Society (OJ-COMS) invites manuscript submissions in the area of reconfigurable intelligent surface-based communications for the 6th generation (6G) wireless networks.

The future 6G communications looks exciting with the potential new use cases and challenging requirements. However, one thing has become certain to academia and industry members in the 5G standardization process: there is no single enabling technology in the physical layer (PHY) that can support diverse 5G application requirements. Within this perspective, extensive research has already started on 6G wireless technologies. Although a plethora of modern PHY solutions have been introduced in the last few decades, it is undeniable that a level of saturation has been reached in terms of adapted modulation/coding solutions and accordingly the maximum capacity. In other words, innovative research on finding both spectrum and energy efficient techniques with low hardware cost is still imperative for realizing a sustainable wireless network evolution with scalable cost in the future.

Since the beginning of the modern era of wireless communications, the propagation medium has been perceived as a randomly behaving entity between the transmitter and the receiver, which generally degrades the quality of the received signal due to the uncontrollable interactions of the transmitted radio waves with the surrounding objects. However, this common belief has been changed by the recent advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), also known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), large intelligent surfaces (LISs), smart mirrors, programmable wireless environments (PWEs), hypersurfaces (HSFs) etc., which enables the proactive control of the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics of the radio waves, by overcoming the negative effects of natural wireless propagation. Recent results have revealed that RISs can effectively enable novel and effective functionalities including wave absorption, tunable anomalous reflection, and reflection phase modification, which makes it as a potential candidate for 6G to overcome the inherent drawbacks of legacy wireless systems.

This special issue aims to capture the most recent and promising research advances on the analysis, design, simulation, modeling, and implementation of RIS-assisted wireless networks, and to provide new research directions in this emerging field of research. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Design and modeling of RIS-assisted communication systems
• Fundamental performance limits of RIS-assisted wireless networks
• Experimental results and real-time implementation of RISs
• Machine/deep learning (ML/DL) based solutions for RIS-assisted communication systems
• Channel estimation for RIS-assisted communication systems
• Transmission protocol design/optimization for RIS-assisted wireless networks
• Resource allocation and interference management with non-ideal and practical RIS models
• RIS-assisted multi-user and non-orthogonal multiple access systems
• RIS-assisted physical layer security and cognitive radio/spectrum sharing solutions
• Radio localization with RISs
• Deployment and network planning of RIS-empowered wireless networks
• Application of RISs for massive MIMO, millimeter wave and TeraHertz communication systems
• Integration of RISs to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems, and vehicular communications

Submission Guidelines

Submit manuscript to Manuscript Central. For information regarding IEEE OJ-COMS including its publication policy and fees, please visit the website.

Lead Guest Editor

Emil Björnson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Guest Editors

Ian F. Akyildiz, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Linglong Dai, Tsinghua University, China
Andreas Pitsillides, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Qingqing Wu, National University of Singapore, Singapore

For inquiries regarding this Special Issue, please contact Lead Guest Editor at emilbjo@kth.se.