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Physical Communication 11 (2014) 1–2

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Physical Communication

 journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phycom

Editorial

Radio Access Beyond OFDM(A)

The ever increasing number of users along with wide

variety of wireless communication applications, and the

demand for higher and higher data rates from the wireless

communication systems lead more adaptive, flexible and

efficient future radio access techniques. Due to their ability

to provide high data rates for multimedia applications

and excellent flexibility in providing multi-user frequency

diversity, spectrally efficient multi-carrier modulation

techniques have gained a strong interest for wide area,

local area, and personal area networks. A special case of 

multi-carrier modulation is orthogonal frequency division

multiplexing (OFDM) that can overcome many problems

that arise with high bit rate communication, the biggest

of which is the time dispersion. It appears like the

trend on the use of OFDM-like and/or multicarrier-like

waveforms is expected to continue in the future with the

development of the next generation of mobile wireless

communications. In spite of many advantages, OFDM and

its popular multiple access version, OFDMA, have some

drawbacks like high spectral side-lobes, large peak-to-

average power ratio, lack of immunity against frequency

dispersive impairments, loss of orthogonality due to the

difficulty for synchronizing to multiple points; making

them inefficient in applying for some applications like

opportunistic spectrum access (like TV-white space radio),

power efficient transmission (like uplink for cellular radio),

high mobility applications, and heterogeneous networks.

In addition to the improvements on OFDM(A) to provide

robustness against these issues, alternative approaches

have also been developed recently including DFT-Spread-

OFDMA, filterbank multicarrier (FBMC) schemes, hybrid

approaches, etc. For example, FBMC is considered as analternative for secondary spectrum usage due to the very

low out-of-band energy of each subcarrier signal when

compared to OFDM. Similarly, SC-FDMA is considered for

LTE and LTE-advanced for uplink communication due to its

power efficiency.

This special issue is devoted to innovative ideas for

the design and implementation of OFDM-like waveforms

that will meet the requirements of future generations

of wireless communications as well as new applications

that can benefit from the multipath resilience and

high throughput offered by these techniques. The issue

comprises six high-quality papers whose topicsrange from

the design of the waveform to multiple accessing. All the

papers are peer-reviewed.

Huseyin Arslan   has received his B.S. degree

from Middle East Technical University (METU),Ankara, Turkey in 1992; M.S. and Ph.D. degreesin 1994 and 1998 from Southern MethodistUni-versity (SMU), Dallas, TX, USA. From January1998 to August 2002, he was with the researchgroup ofEricsson Inc., NC,USA,where he wasin-volved with several project related to 2G and3Gwireless communication systems. Since August2002, he has been with the Electrical Engineer-ing Dept. of University of South Florida, Tampa,

FL, USA. In addition, he has worked as part time consultant for variouscompanies and institutions including Anritsu Company (Morgan Hill, CA,USA), The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.

Dr. Arslan’s research interests are related to advanced signal process-ing techniques at the physical and medium access layers, with cross-layer design for networking adaptivity and Quality of Service (QoS)control. He is interested in many forms of wireless technologies includ-

ing cellular radio, wireless PAN/LAN/MANs, fixed wireless access, aero-nautical networks, underwater networks, in-vivo networks, and wirelesssensors networks. The current research interests are on physical layer se-curity, signal intelligence, cognitive radio, small cells, powerline commu-nications, smart grid, UWB, multi-carrier wireless technologies, dynamicspectrum access, co-existence issues on heterogeneous networks, aero-nautical (High Altitude Platform) communications, in-vivo channel mod-eling and system design, and underwater acoustic communications. Hehasserved as technical programcommitteechair, technical programcom-mittee member, sessionand symposium organizer, and workshop chair inseveral IEEE conferences. He is currently a member of the editorial boardfor ‘‘IEEE Transactions on Communications’’, ‘‘Physical Communication Journal’’ by Elsevier, and ‘‘Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineer-ing’’ by Hindawi Publishing Corporation. He hasalsoserved eight years asa member of the editorialboard for‘‘Wireless Communicationand MobileComputing Journal’’ by Wiley.

Kwang-Cheng Chen  received B.S. from the Na-tional Taiwan University in 1983, M.S. andPh.D. from the University of Maryland, CollegePark, United States, in 1987 and 1989, all inelectrical engineering. From 1987 to 1998, Dr.Chen worked with SSE, COMSAT, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and National TsingHua University, in mobile communications.Since 1998, Dr. Chen has been with the Gradu-ate Institute of Communication Engineering andDepartment of Electrical Engineering, National

Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. He was appointed as the Irv-ing T. Ho Chair Professor from 2007 to 2008, and the Director of 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.phycom.2014.04.002

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© 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.

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the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, and Director of Communication Research Center, 2009–2012. Dr. Chen is now Distin-guished Professor and Associate Dean for academic affairs, College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, NationalTaiwanUniversity.He was visiting Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in California USA during1997 anda Guest Professor at theDelftUniversity of Technology,Nether-lands, 1998, Aalborg University, Denmark, 2008, and Visiting Scientist atthe Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, 2012–2013, SKKU Fellow Professor, Korea, 2013–2014. Dr. Chenwas adjunctly appointed by the Executive Yuan Science and TechnologyAdvisory Group to plan Taiwan’s communication and networking tech-nologies during 1998–2002, including telecommunication deregulation,cellular/fixed-network licensing, international trade negotiation, and fa-cilitation of NCCunder the authorization of Premiere.Dr. Chenactively in-volves the technical organization of numerous leading IEEE conferences,including as theTechnical ProgramCommitteeChair of 1996IEEE Interna-tional Symposium on PersonalIndoorMobile Radio Communications, TPCco-chair for IEEE Globecom 2002, General co-chair for 2007 IEEE MobileWiMAX Symposium in Orlando, USA, 2009 IEEE Mobile WiMAX Sympo-siumin NapaValley,USA, theIEEE 2010Spring Vehicular Technology Con-ference, 2011 IEEE Online Conference on Green Communications, WPMC2012, and many others.

Petri Mähönen   is professor of networked sys-tems at the RWTH Aachen University. He is achair and founding director of Institute for Net-worked Systems at the RWTH Aachen Univer-sity. He is also a member of steering board,research area coordinator, and PI of the UMICResearch Centre in Aachen, one of the researchclusters funded by German Federal and StateGovernment excellence initiative. His research

interests and background include work on wire-lessInternet, softwaredefinedradios, embeddednetworking and IoT protocols, cognitive radio networking, spectral effi-ciency, spatial statistics, and large-scale mm-wave systems.

Huseyin Arslan

Kwang-Cheng ChenPetri Mähönen

Available online 15 May 2014