The advancement in wireless technology from the 2G GSM to the 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and advanced LTE systems has offered enhanced network capacity and reduced delay to access in application-server and enjoy the triple-play games involving data, voice and video exchanges wirelessly, anytime anywhere in real time. The network data rate has improved from 64 Kbps to 100 Mbps in 4G, further leading to enhanced data transfer rate, meeting robust scalability, connectivity and energy efficiency. The society of 2020 would be connected through IoT interfaced with intelligent and integrated sensor systems in home and working places to provide ubiquitous connectivity. The emerging 5G communication system expects 10 Gbps peak data rates with 8~10 bps/Hz/cell spectral efficiency and therefore requires a mix of new system concepts to boost spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and also network design to exploit the benefits of massive MIMO technologies, green communications, cooperative communications and heterogeneous wireless networks. The benchmark from Ericsson, reported in its website, claims 5 Gbps speed in live test of pre-standard 5G, using an innovative new radio interface concept in combination with advanced Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is recognized as one of the technology components of the evolving 5G architecture to ensure public safety and proximity-based services and also attracting much attention of IEEE ComSoc experts and industry leaders to explore new design approaches for such applications.

This issue includes three research papers primarily addressing the challenges faced in wireless networks to address resource allocation, information processing and hardware implementation to ensure a better throughput in the network. The first paper discusses the distributed resource allocation problem in cellular networks. The second and third papers report the image processing techniques and efficient hardware device designs respectively to improve the network performance at physical level.

Heterogeneous cellular network is emerging as a promising technology for 5th generation mobile networks to potentially improve resource utilization to achieve significantly higher data rates. The first paper, “Distributed Resource Allocation for Two-Tier Heterogeneous Cellular Networks“, by O Oguejiofor, A Abe, A N Aniedu and G N Okechukwu, presents resource allocation to mitigate the loss in achievable data rate due to interference and thus ensures a required data rate by incorporating higher spatial reuse. The paper utilizes the spatial resource and the power resource to formulate a distributed spatial resource allocation strategy in terms of a quadratic optimization problem with non-convex quadratic constraints. The findings of the paper show that the proposed distributed RA strategy outperforms other existing distributed RA strategies.

The second paper, “An Entropy-Based Binarization Method to Separate Foreground from Background in Document Image Processing“, by Parthajit Roy and Swati Adhikari, proposes a novel entropy-based fuzzy clustering method for text binarization of a gray-level document image by considering the spatial information of the gray pixels and the original gray level values. The proposed method incorporates fuzzy logic-based decision system and evaluates the performance for several images to show a better result as compared to the existing methods in the case of standard images.

In modern telecommunication system design, compact circuits and systems are essential to meet the requirement of high speed signal processing blocks to lower the system cost. High packing density and low power dissipation in a chip are the needs of very large-scale integrated circuits. The third paper, “Evolution of Non-Conventional MOS Device Structures: A Review“, by Navneet Kaur, Munish Rattan and Sandeep Singh Gill, is a review reporting the performance advantages of advanced non-conventional MOS structure devices used in VLSI circuits. The paper discusses appropriate models, which have been developed to examine the device performances. The paper reports various models and design improvement path for MOS devices from the bulk MOSFETs, MG MOSFETs to a self-aligned FinFET having various cross-sectional geometries.