Call for Papers

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To boost the development of the emerging applications in wireless networks, such as smart city, Intelligent transportation system, smart industry, smart agriculture, AR/VR/MR, a large number of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices will be widely deployed. Therefore, it is critical to design novel spectrum-, energy- and cost-efficient wireless communication technologies to support massive IoT devices over a large area. Recently, symbiotic communication that integrates active and passive communications has emerged as a promising technology to fulfill such demand. Symbiotic communication is emerging as an innovative wireless paradigm for simultaneously supporting active primary transmission and passive IoT transmission. The key idea is to modify and reflect the incident signals from the active primary transmitter instead of generating signals by itself (i.e., riding on the active communication for passive IoT information transfer), thus avoiding the need of power-hungry RF chains (e.g., oscillators and power amplifier) which achieves high spectrum- and energy-efficiency for both primary and secondary systems. The particular feature makes it possible to realize the passive information transfer where ambient backscatter communication can be used at IoT device by modulating signal on the incident signals from the active transmitter, and/or other advanced low power transmission/protocol design, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS).

While with wide range of applications, the research of symbiotic communications for the IoT is still in its infancy and calls for more extensive and in-depth research efforts. Effective symbiotic communications will be created by drawing upon intertwined research areas including backscatter communications, ultra-low power transmission, cognitive radio, machine learning, and signal processing. This Special Issue (SI) aims to consolidate solid works of the current state-of-the art in terms of fundamental research ideas and network engineering, geared towards exploiting symbiotic communications for providing sophisticated wireless platform with ultra-low power even zero-power transmission over a large scale of wireless devices, to boost the development of connected autonomous driving, massive IoT, smart grid, intelligent manufactory, AR/VR/MR, and etc. Theoretical, experimental studies, and also case studies are highly encouraged. Relevant topics related to symbiotic communication include, but are not limited to:

• Signal processing technologies
• System Modelling
• Transceiver design
• Performance analysis
• Modulation and demodulation  
• Secrecy and covert communication
• Standards and network protocols 
• Multiple access schemes  
• Radio resource management and scheduling
• AI-empowered designs
• Novel transmission technologies
• Enabling technologies such as wireless powered communication, integrated sensing and communication, edge computing and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
• Emerging applications via edge intelligence: vehicular networking, massive IoT, smart grid, healthcare, intelligent manufactory, etc;
• Context-aware schemes: incentive mechanisms, game theoretic approach, network economic etc.
• Mobility management
• Tactile internet
• Prototyping, test-beds and field trials.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts that conform to the standard format as indicated in the IEEE TCCN guidelines. All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted to Manuscript Central according to the following schedule:

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 15 February 2024 (Extended Deadline)
Initial Decision: 10 April 2024
Revised Manuscript Due: 10 June 2024
Final Decision: 20 July 2024
Final Manuscript Due: 31 July 2024
Publication: Second Half 2024

Guest Editors

Zheng Chang
University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Ying-Chang Liang
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

Dusit Niyato
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Linda Jiang Xie
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Nguyen Huynh
Edinburgh Napier University, UK