Call for Papers

High-quality hospitals and health resources are mostly located in big cities. Remote areas are lack of these infrastructures and resources. The rapid siphon effect of big cities exacerbates the disparity of medical conditions of the remote areas. Additionally, technological advances are rendering huge digital gaps between cities and remote areas. It is widely agreed that the technology development is to make human life more convenient, but not to distinguish people according to their living places or any other characteristics. However, most digital technologies, such as the fifth generation (5G), are revenue driven and are deployed in big cities, aiming to deliver even faster transmission speed, even better cellular coverage, and even more connected devices for these dense areas, while little effort has been placed on improving the connectivity of the remote areas.

Indeed, it is unrealistic to force people in remote areas to move to cities, or force medical doctors in big cities to go to the remote areas. Leveraging some technical methods, for instance, the 5G and beyond technologies-enabled remote e-health (5GB remote e-health), is a better choice. This Special Issue is an appeal for more attention and technical solutions on the remote area’s medical conditions. Researchers from both academia and industry are welcomed to publish their latest efforts, to identify and discuss multi-disciplinary technical challenges, solutions, legislations and recent advances related to 5GB remote health. It is designed to attract papers that will address the key challenges of 5GB remote health. Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers in any of, but not limited to, the following or related topics of interest:

• Physical layer technologies for 5GB remote e-health; i.e., massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO), millimeter wave (mmWave), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), licensed/unlicensed frequency bandwidth
• Networking technologies for 5GB remote e-health; i.e., software defined networking (SDN), information-centric networking, content-centric networking, network slicing
• New architecture technologies for 5GB remote e-health; i.e., heterogeneous networks (HetNets), mobile edge computing
• Optimal resource allocation technologies for 5GB remote e-health; i.e., proactive caching, optimal frequency
• Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for 5GB remote-e-health; i.e., surgical robotics, medical image processing, unmanned ambulance
• Cyber security and information protection technologies for 5GB remote e-health; i.e., radio frequency (RF) fingerprint detection and authentication, encryption and decryption algorithm, mimicry defense
• State-of-the-art 5GB remote e-health applications for Coronavirus-19 and remote area’s medical conditions

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 “June 2021/5GB Remote e-Health” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 September 2020
Initial Decision Date: 1 December 2020
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 January 2021
Final Decision Date: 1 February 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 15 February 2021
Publication Date: June 2021

Guest Editors

Di Zhang
Zhengzhou University, China

Yunkai Zhai
National Health Center and National Engineering Laboratory for Internet Medical Systems and Applications, China

Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Federal University of Piauí (UFPI), Brazil; Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal

Kaoru Sezaki
The University of Tokyo, Japan