With the ability to detect and adapt to the surrounding environment, CR has become one of the widely recognized features for the future wireless communication systems. Specifically, CR has been recommended as a key technology to solve the spectrum scarcity problem in the next generation cellar networks. For example, IEEE 802.16h standard was recently published for the license-exempt operation of WiMAX networks by defining a set of CR capabilities. On the other hand, a lot of efforts are being taken to introducing CR features into 3GPP LTE-Advanced.

Evidently, integrating CR technologies into future generation cellular networks is becoming more and more important and will attract significant attentions from both academia and industry. Nevertheless, despite the large amount of research work conducted in recent years, there are still many open problems in developing and deploying large-scale CR based cellular networks.

To help addressing such open issues, this feature topic will focus on the state-of-the-art research and development in various aspects of cognitive radio for next generation cellular networks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Usage of TV white space in cellular networks
• Cooperative spectrum sensing in cellular network
• Coordinated and uncoordinated spectrum sharing in 3G/4G environment
• Mobility management and hand-over in cognitive cellular networks
• Economic aspects and Pricing model for cognitive cellular networks
• Management and optimization of cognitive radio resources
• Spectrum trading, auction, and bidding in cellular network
• Synchronization and channel estimation for cognitive radio
• QoS provisioning and cross-layer design in cognitive cellular networks
• Security enhancement for cognitive cellular networks
• Theoretical capacity and practical data rates in cognitive cellular networks
• The integration of cognitive radio and femtocell
• Cognitive radio related 3G/4G Standards
• Experimental test-beds and results
• Cognitive Policy Management and Standardization
• Cognitive Radio User Services and Emerging Applications
• Cognitive Hybrid Network Architectures

The papers should be tutorial in nature to help non-expert readers gain a good understanding of the topic. The papers should also discuss recent advances and future research topics. Authors must follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine guidelines for preparation of the manuscript. For further details, please refer to "Submission Guidelines" in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine website at: http://dl.comsoc.org/pci/. Authors must follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine guidelines for preparation of the manuscript and submit it via Manuscript Central http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ieee-wcm.

Submission Schedule

Manuscript Submission: October 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2013
Final Manuscript Due: February 1, 2013
Publication: April 2013

Guest Editors

Kejie Lu
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, USA
kejie.lu@upr.edu

Bo Rong
Communications Research Centre Canada, Canada
bo.rong@crc.ca

Guangyi Liu
Research Institute of China Mobile Communication Corporations , China
liuguangyi@chinamobile.com

Sastri Kota
SoHum Consultants, USA
skota@sohumconsultants.com

Xinbing Wang
Shanghai Jiaotong University, China
xwang8@sjtu.edu.cn