A wide variety of applications for road safety and traffic efficiency are intended to answer the urgent call for smarter, greener, and safer mobility. Although IEEE 802.11p is considered the de facto standard for on-the-road communications, stakeholders have recently started to investigate the usability of LTE to support vehicular applications. In this article, related work and running standardization activities are scanned and critically discussed; strengths and weaknesses of LTE as an enabling technology for vehicular communications are analyzed; and open issues and critical design choices are highlighted to serve as guidelines for future research in this hot topic.

The actual development of the Internet of Things (IoT) needs major issues related to things' service discovery and composition to be addressed. This paper proposes a possible approach to solve such issues. We introduce a novel paradigm of "social network of intelligent objects", namely the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), based on the notion of social relationships among objects. Following the definition of a possible social structure among objects, a preliminary architecture for the implementation of SIoT is presented. Through the SIoT paradigm, the capability of humans and devices to discover, select, and use objects with their services in the IoT is augmented. Besides, a level of trustworthiness is enabled to steer the interaction among the billions of objects which will crowd the future IoT.

Fifth-generation (5G) telecommunication systems are expected to meet the world market demands of accessing and delivering services anywhere and anytime. The Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) systems are able to satisfy the requests of anywhere and anytime connections by offering wide-area coverage and ensuring service availability, continuity, and scalability. In this work, we review the 3GPP NTN features and their potential for satisfying the user expectations in 5G & beyond networks. The state of the art, current 3GPP research activities, and open issues are summarized to highlight the importance of NTN over the wireless communication landscape. Future research directions are also identified to assess the role of NTN in 5G and beyond systems.

Social networking concepts have been applied to several communication network settings, which span from delay-tolerant to peer-to-peer networks. More recently, one can observe a flourish of proposals aimed at giving social-like capabilities to the objects in the Internet of Things. Such proposals address the design of conceptual (and software) platforms, which can be exploited to easily develop and implement complex applications that require direct interactions among objects. The major goal is to build techniques that allow the network to enhance the level of trust between objects that are "friends" with each other. Furthermore, a social paradigm could definitely guarantee network navigability even if the number of nodes becomes orders of magnitude higher than in the traditional Internet. Objectives of this article are to analyze the major opportunities arising from the integration of social networking concepts into the Internet of Things, present the major ongoing research activities, and point out the most critical technical challenges.