Quality of experience (QoE) is the subjective acceptability of the quality of a telecommunication service perceived by the user. This paper expands the vision to new QoE acceptability for the future 5G networks and analyzes the impact of the main challenges of 5G on QoE. An efficient QoE estimation method tailored for 5G systems is also proposed based on the neural network (NN) approach. Due to their ability to fully learn the causal relationship between network parameters of quality of services (QoS) and the resulting QoE, NN can be suitable to gain QoE self-optimization for 5G. Again, new increasingly smart user devices will be delegated to handle the most burdensome tasks of ensuring user satisfaction.

This paper presents a condensed review of the European smart body area network (BAN) standardization work and its already published standards. The work is carried out under the ETSI Technical Committee (TC) SmartBAN. The goal of ETSI TC SmartBAN is to define and develop new European BAN standards; fostering the successful market adoption of wireless BAN technology by providing a standardized way to bring new interoperable products into the health, medical, sport, leisure and IoT markets, targeting to global exploitation. TC SmartBAN covers wireless communications, especially the physical and medium access control layers, associated security, semantic interoperability and open data representation, which are necessary features in the data transmissions, as well as building blocks of the future smart coordinator. The use of smart coordinator centralizes the network intelligence to the hub, which enables implementation of simple nodes. The SmartBAN approach will be computationally light, and it supports reliable operations across heterogeneous networks. Due to the semantic approach in all functional levels, SmartBAN also supports high interoperability. For emergency traffic, SmartBAN provides different priority classes and fast channel access associated with a low latency. Novel concept adopted in the SmartBAN for high-priority traffic is a multi-use channel access, which can also improve the spectral efficiency. Not only on-body nodes and applications, TC SmartBAN is considering in-body communications for capsule endoscopy. In addition, SmartBAN collaborates with other standardization groups, such as oneM2M and AIOTI, to widen the impact of its work.

A simple diamond half-duplex relay network composed of a source, two decode-and-forward half-duplex relays, and a destination is considered, where a direct link between the source and the destination does not exist. For this network, we study the case of buffer-aided relays, where the relays are equipped with buffers. Each relay can receive data from the source, store it in the buffer, and forward it to the destination, when the channel conditions are advantageous. Thereby, buffering enables adaptive scheduling of the transmissions and receptions over time, which allows the network to exploit the diversity offered by the fading channels. For the considered half-duplex network, four transmission modes are defined based on whether the relay nodes receive or transmit. In this paper, we derive the locally optimal scheduling of the transmission modes over time and investigate the achievable average rate, when the relays are affected by inter-relay interference. Since the proposed buffer-aided transmission policies introduce unbounded delay, we provide a sub-optimal buffer-aided transmission policy with limited delay. Moreover, for inter-relay interference cancellation, we consider two coding schemes with different complexities. In the first scheme, we employ dirty paper coding, which entails a high complexity, whereas in the second scheme, we adopt a low-complexity technique based on successive interference cancellation at the receiving relay nodes and optimal power allocation at the transmitting nodes. Our numerical results show that the proposed protocols, with and without delay constraints, outperform existing protocols for the considered network from the literature.

Recently, quantum computing and communications rapidly developed to interconnect heterogeneous quantum devices. In particular, some researchers have been performed about terrestrial quantum communications over typical optical fiber links. However, this technology is affected by extremely high losses that can be faced only through the deployment of several repeaters, which in turn involve impractical costs for end-to-end (E2E) route management. Quantum Satellite Networks (QSNs) can overcome the limitations of terrestrial optical networks, such as a remarkable signal attenuation over long distances and difficulty of intercontinental communications. The recent studies on quantum satellite communications motivated our research towards a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) quantum satellite backbone for interconnecting quantum on Earth Servers in order to achieve an unprecedented computational capacity. Specifically, our paper proposes a near optimum E2E path evaluation procedure allowing an efficient switching in order to maximize the entanglement generation rate. Indeed, this is one of the main issues that involve the Data Link Layer and the Network Layer of the Quantum Internet (QI) protocol stack, which is in its early standardization phase. In particular, the design of our approach is based on the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm with the aim of minimizing the number of hops for E2E connection and maximizing network capacity. Therefore, we compare distributed and centralized approaches in order to achieve a trade-off between performance and cost.