5G Multimedia Communications: Theory, Technology, and Application

The five papers in this special section focus on fifth generation mobile (5G) multimedia communications. Multimedia systems are becoming a part of daily life in our society, industry, and academia. Meanwhile, intensive research toward the fifth generation wireless communication networks is progressing in many fronts, addressing higher mobile data volume, typical user data rate, number of connected devices, and lower end-to-end latency. Due to the challenges of supporting such multimedia information in terms of compression, encoding, transmission, processing, synchronization, storage and mining, traditional multimedia communications, and processing schemes cannot handle effectively in the 5G environment. There is a growing demand of developing and designing theory, technologies and applications for 5G multimedia communications. In the context of 5G wireless communication networks, new theory and technologies will support a diversity of multimedia applications, such as surveillance video, entertainment and social media, voice and video, medical image, business transactions, and Internet-of-Things-based streams.