Call for Papers

IEEE Communications Magazine

Telecommunications Standards

Virtually all of the world's telecommunication systems have their roots in research. Academic research and findings have helped system designers to decide on the overall system architecture to the smallest details. Another aspect that the telecommunication systems have in common is the need to be well defined to guarantee interoperability between different devices. This is possible only through standardization bodies. As a result research and standards are clearly two vital components for the success of telecommunications. Interestingly, communication between academia which focuses mainly on research and industry whose main interest is standardization is below a desirable level. Since research has so much to offer and standards are the basic requirement for large scale deployment, the natural question is how to bridge the gap between research and standards.

Research and standardization activities are different in many respects. Research typically is more forward looking and often does not necessarily confine itself to problems such as deployment obstacles, security considerations, manageability and other issues that are of primary concern to people involved in standardization. Standards professionals typically are cognizant of deployment and product issues and therefore more practical in their approach. Often they are skeptical when confronted with research work and reluctant to take on even the more short-term and practical research findings. They are typically concerned about whether the research has been adequately verified to work with the desired reliability outside a laboratory environment in a large-scale network. It seems that there is a gap between what the researchers consider the output of their work and what the standards professionals consider to be the input to their work. For that reason these two domains are often at odds and mutually complain about the inability to see each other's point of view.

As a part of a global telecommunication community, it is important that researchers and standardization experts work hand in hand. Researchers need to understand the real-world limitations that standardization experts are bound to in order to compromise enough so that their research work can make it into standards. On the other hand, standardization experts need to become more open towards research work and attempt to distill applicable research output from larger, more forward-looking research projects. This special issue is therefore dedicated to research work which is already included in standards and shows how it is achieved; current research work focused to become part of a new standard or enhance an existing one, and works done to make adoption by the relevant standards body likely.

The overarching aim is to document procedures, practices, compromises and tactics that bring researchers and standards professionals closer together. Collaboration is often difficult and documenting successful cases where research results became the foundation of standards will benefit both, researchers and standards professionals to more successfully collaborate in the future.

Original contributions, previously unpublished and not currently under review, are solicited in relevant areas including (but not limited to) the following standardization bodies:

Prospective authors should follow the IEEE Communications Magazine manuscript format described in the information for authors. All papers should be submitted via the magazine's manuscript central at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/commag-ieee and in PDF format via email to Dr. Tarik Taleb, tarik.taleb@neclab.eu or talebtarik@ieee.org, according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Submission Due: August 31, 2012
Acceptance Notification: November 30, 2012
Final Manuscript Due: December 31, 2012
Publication Date: March 2013

Guest editors
Dr. Tarik Taleb, NEC Europe Ltd, Germany.
Prof. Rolf Winter, University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany.
Dr. Tuncer Baykas, National Institute of Information and Communications, Japan
Dr. Farooq Bari , AT&T, USA