Call for Papers

The coming 5G era will boosting both the personal broadband mobile communications and the industry utilizations greatly. According to the time table defined in ITU, the proposals for 5G systems must be submitted in 2019, and they will be then evaluated to make a final IMT-2020 specifications by the end of 2020. The evaluation will be based on certain evaluation criteria including key performance indicators (KPIs). The different usage scenarios of 5G will set different priorities for the KPIs. Also, the key new features brought by the 5G systems, such as mmWave and 5G New Radio, will highly impact those KPIs.  Testing and field trials are essentially demanding to evaluate the KPIs, and the related technologies have attracted more and more attention from both the academia and industry. To reflect recent research advances on the 5G testing and field trials, this special issue calls for original papers with contributions in, but not limit to, the following topics:

• Testing and field trials environment building for 5G, including testing network architecture and deployment, wireless propagation modeling and measurements.
• Development of testing tools and algorithms for 5G, including testing instruments design, software development,  programming languages and models, trouble shooting tools, and various algorithms for testing and field trials.
• Testing and field trial cases design for 5G, including new KPIs and metrics defining to meet the challenges such as the massive scalability and the ultra-reliability, methodologies for measurement and calculation of the new KPIs and metrics.
• Vertical business use cases of 5G testing and field trials, including spectrum management, policy control and charging, security and privacy, services and applications, and techno-economic analysis.
• Testing and field trials of 5G with other wireless networks, including converged broadcasting and mobile networks, and other various heterogeneous networks.
• Progresses in standardization (including ITU, 3GPP, IEEE, ETSI, ONF and etc.), related to 5G testing and field trials.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “October 2018: 5G Testing and Field Trials” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: February 15, 2018
Initial Decision Date: April 10, 2018
Revised Manuscript Due: May 15, 2018
Final Decision Date: June 15, 2018
Final Manuscript Due: July 10, 2018
Publication Date: October 2018

Guest Editors

Honglin Hu
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Aarne Mämmelä
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland

Rose Qingyang Hu
Utah State University, USA

Kari Horneman
Nokia Bell labs, Nokia Solutions and Networks, Finland