Guest Editorial 5G and Beyond Mobile Technologies and Applications for Industrial IoT (IIoT)

Following the tremendous success of 2G and 3G mobile networks and the fast growth of 4G, the next generation mobile networks (5G) was proposed aiming to provide infinite networking capability to mobile users. Differentiated from 4G, a benefit offered by 5G is much more than the increased maximum throughput. It aims to involve and benefit from many current technical advances including Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). As the IIoT integrates many heterogeneous networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Mobile Communication Networks (3G/4G/LTE/5G), Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) and wearable health care systems, it is critical to design self-organizing and smart protocols for heterogeneous ad hoc networks in various IoT applications, such as cyber-physical systems, cloud computing for heterogeneous ad hoc networks, large-scale sensor networks, data acquisition from distributed smart devices, green communication and applications, environmental monitoring and control, etc. Moreover, based on the survey conducted by the World Health Organization, the world will lack 12.9 million healthcare workers by 2035. Hence, it is important to develop wearable healthcare systems to perform self-health monitoring. In general, wearable healthcare systems demands low power consumption and high measurement accuracy. Smart technologies including green electronics, green radios, fuzzy neural approaches and intelligent signal processing techniques play important roles in the developments of the wearable healthcare systems. Therefore, this special issue provides a forum to discuss the recent advances on 5G and beyond mobile technologies and applications for IIoT.