Location awareness is an essential feature for many existing and emerging applications, especially in the context of 5G and Beyond (B5G) networks. However, current solutions generally fail to provide accurate location awareness. For example, the ability of satellite navigation systems to provide location information are hampered in urban canyons or indoor conditions, while 4G and Wi-Fi networks fail to provide the level of accuracy required by several emerging applications.

The goal of this Feature Topic (FT) is to present solutions for accurate localization in 5G and B5G networks. This FT is open to contributions that belong to the following areas: i) localization techniques for 5G and B5G networks; ii) location-based services and applications; and iii) use cases of location-aware networks. It represents an opportunity to connect researchers and practitioners from industry and academia to share their recent findings in 5G and B5G localization networks. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Integration of localization features in 5G and B5G architectures
• Security and privacy issues of localization algorithms
• 5G and B5G-based terminal localization techniques
• Device-free localization
• Exploiting localization information in smart network-management
• Localization-assisted self-driving objects
• Localization-aware emergency services
• New applications exploiting localization information
• Analytics, learning, and inference algorithms for localization
• Case-studies of verticals exploiting localization features
• Integration of localization, sensing, and communications in 5G and B5G

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “November 2021/Localization” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 May 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time extended to  8 May 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time
Decision Notification: 1 August 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 15 September 2021
Publication Date: November 2021

Guest Editors

Luca Chiaraviglio
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Sana Ben Jemaa
Orange, France

Augustin Alexandru Saucan
MIT, USA

Tingting Zhang
Harbin Institute of Technology, & Peng Cheng Laboratory, China