The future wireless landscape, often associated with 5G, envisions three types of connectivity: enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), and massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC). The latter two are seen as two generic types that support Internet of Things (IoT) communication, putting forward new types of requirements and research challenges, such as: protocols that operate with short packets, techniques to achieve and assess extremely high reliability, tradeoffs between massiveness and high-reliability, etc. This set of challenges is further enriched by the advent of distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain and smart contracts that allow autonomous interaction among IoT devices. The consensus protocols that set the basis for blockchain systems are critically reliant on communication, but they change the traffic pattern that has been envisioned for pre-blockchain IoT communication systems. This talk will give a perspective on the communication engineering challenges related to the emerging systems for IoT connectivity, elaborate on the fundamental tradeoffs and outline methods and architectures to solve them.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have found numerous applications in wireless communication, as either aerial user terminal or mobile access point (AP). Compared to conventional terrestrial wireless systems, UAVs? communications face new challenges due to their high altitude above the ground and great flexibility of movement, bringing several crucial issues such as how to exploit line-of-sight (LoS) dominant UAV-ground channels while mitigating resulted strong interference, meet distinct UAV communication requirements on critical control messages versus high-rate payload data, cater for the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as leveraging the new degree of freedom via controlling the UAV trajectory for communication performance enhancement. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the above challenges and practical issues in UAV communications, their state-of-the-art solutions (with an emphasis on promising signal processing and optimization techniques used in them), as well as important directions for future research.