Nowadays society is demanding more and more smart healthcare services that allow monitoring patient status in a non-invasive way, anywhere and anytime. Thus, healthcare applications are currently facing important challenges guided by the u-health (ubiquitous health) and p-health (pervasive health) paradigms. New emerging technologies can be combined with other widely deployed ones to develop such next-generation healthcare systems. The main objective of this paper is to review and provide more details on the work presented in “LOBIN: E-Textile and Wireless-Sensor-Network-Based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments”, published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, as well as to extend and update the comparison with other similar systems. As a result, the paper discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of using different architectures and communications technologies to develop wearable systems for pervasive healthcare applications.

A Mobile Networks Digital Twin (MNDT) is a virtual replica of a mobile communication network that accurately models the devices, the communication links, the operating environment, and the applications that run on the physical network. By replicating different environments in a laboratory and running multiple scenarios, Digital Twins provide a cost-effective way to evaluate performance, predict the effects of network changes, optimize network management, and make appropriate decisions. This paper presents a methodology for automatically creating and using Network Digital Twins, along with a proposed architecture for performing this implementation. This work is framed in the context of the B5GEMINI project, whose goal is to develop an MNDT applied to a 5G core environment and its evolution towards 6G, being able to apply it to use cases in advanced scenarios such as cybersecurity or Industry 4.0. The proposed methodology covers the entire lifecycle of the MNDT, from the initial phases of data acquisition and modeling to the phases of use and bidirectional connection between physical and digital elements.

Power line communications (PLC) have been an active research area for many years and it is still the case, mainly because they present economic and technical natural advantages for a wide range of applications using the existing electrical grid as transmission medium. In this paper, the authors provide an update on PLC technologies and their applications in Smart Grids, the main challenges they are currently facing, how they can be addressed, and the current research initiatives.

As third-generation (mobile) networks (3G networks) become a commercial reality, strong movements are emerging in the direction of a common infrastructure based on the Internet protocol (IP). The users' mobile devices are like another IP host connected to the Internet. In such a scenario, the network operator infrastructure is degraded to bit pipes. To avoid this, the 3G partnership project (3GPP) and ETSI TISPAN have designed IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), a service platform that aims to place the network operator again in the central role of service provisioning. In this article we examine IMS from a mobile operator's perspective and analyse its possible adaptation to the next-generation networks

Upgrading current electricity grid to the so-called Smart Grid represents one of the major engineering challenges ever. Hence, the road toward the Smart Grid will be long and needs to be paved gradually, certainly driving the next wave of research and innovation in both the energy and the ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) sectors. Currently, the earliest stages of such a complex project are being undertaken and AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructures) stand out as the first steps toward the Smart Grid. The Spanish R&D (Research and Development) demonstration project PRICE-GEN aims to be a flagship AMI project at both national and international level. It is focused on increasing the awareness of the status of the low voltage power distribution network through an optimal and interoperable communications architecture which provides detailed information on customers’ consumption and generation. The project entails the deployment of over 200,000 smart meters in the area of Madrid, such a pilot scheme being also used as reference in other European R&D projects, such as the IGREENGrid (IntegratinG Renewables in the European Electricity Grid). This paper presents the communications architecture and technologies which are deployed in the field, analyzing how they fit some specific Smart Grid communications requirement. In addition, the paper describes in detail the pilot itself along with the services which are currently been delivered as well as with the foreseen ones. Finally, the main trends in AMI from the ICT perspective are also discussed.

Network Digital Twin (NDT) is a new technology that builds on the concept of Digital Twins (DT) to create a virtual representation of the physical objects of a telecommunications network. NDT bridges physical and virtual spaces to enable coordination and synchronization of physical parts while eliminating the need to directly interact with them. There is broad consensus that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are among the key enablers to this technology. In this work, we present B5GEMINI, which is an NDT for 5G and beyond networks that makes an extensive use of AI and ML. First, we present the infrastructural and architectural components that support B5GEMINI. Next, we explore four paradigmatic applications where AI/ML can leverage B5GEMINI for building new AI-powered applications. In addition, we identify the main components of the AI ecosystem of B5GEMINI, outlining emerging research trends and identifying the open challenges that must be solved along the way. Finally, we present two relevant use cases in the application of NDTs with an extensive use of ML. The first use case lays in the cybersecurity domain and proposes the use of B5GEMINI to facilitate the design of ML-based attack detectors and the second addresses the design of energy efficient ML components and introduces the modular development of NDTs adopting the Digital Map concept as a novelty.