IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

Network slicing to support multi-tenancy plays a key role in improving the performance of 5G and beyond networks. In this paper, we study dynamically slicing network resources in the backhaul and Radio Access Network (RAN) prior to user demand observations across multiple tenants, where each tenant owns and operates several slices to provide different services to users.

Dual-Functional Radar-Communication (DFRC) is a promising paradigm to achieve Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) in beyond 5G. In parallel, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), relying on multi-antenna Rate-Splitting (RS) by splitting messages into common and private streams at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers, has emerged as a new strategy for multi-user multi-antenna communications systems. I

A receiver architecture is proposed to cognitively extract navigation observables from fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) signals of opportunity. Unlike conventional opportunistic receivers which require knowledge of the signal structure, particularly the reference signals (RSs), the proposed cognitive opportunistic navigation (CON) receiver requires knowledge of only the frame duration and carrier frequency of the signal. In 5G NR, some of these RSs are only transmitted on demand, which limits the existing opportunistic...

This paper investigates the problem of secret key generation from correlated Gaussian random variables in the short blocklength regime. Short blocklengths are commonly employed in massively connected IoT sensor networks in 5G and beyond wireless systems. Polar codes have previously been shown to be applicable to the secret key generation problem, and are known to perform well for short blocklengths in the channel coding context. Inspired by these findings, we propose an explicit protocol based on polar codes for generating secret keys in the short blocklength regime.

A private fifth generation (5G) network is a dedicated 5G network with enhanced communication characteristics, unified connectivity, optimized services, and customized security within a specific area. By subsuming the advantages of both public and non-public 5G networks, private 5G networks have found their applications across industry, business, utilities, and the public sector.

The papers in this special section focus on advanced signal procesing for local and private 5G mobile communication netwworks. The papers describe the latest advances in emerging private 5G networks from the perspective of signal processing to advance its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. Some enterprises, factories and other potential users have ultra-stringent communications performance requirements in terms of throughput, latency, reliability, availability, and device density, which cannot be met by 4G long term evolution (LTE) radio features.

Dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems can simultaneously perform both radar and communication functionalities using the same hardware platform and spectrum resource. In this paper, we consider multi-input multi-output (MIMO) DFRC systems and focus on transmit beamforming designs to provide both radar sensing and multi-user communications.

Joint communication and radar sensing (JCR) represents an emerging research field aiming to integrate the above two functionalities into a single system, by sharing the majority of hardware, signal processing modules and, in a typical case, the transmitted signal. The close cooperation of the communication and sensing functions can enable significant improvement of spectrum efficiency, reduction of device size, cost and power consumption, and improvement of performance of both functions. 

The papers in this special section focuses on the exploitation of the radar spectrum for use of commercial wireless communication, as well as emerging applications requiring joint communication and sensing designs. The integration of radar and communication systems has recently attracted a lot of research and commercial interest. The emergence of spectrum-hungry applications have necessitated the exploitation of the permanently allocated, but potentially under-utilized spectral resources, and sharing the frequency bands between radar and communication systems has attracted substantial attention.