Safeguarding 5G-and-Beyond Networks with Physical Layer Security

The eight articles in this special section provide the latest survey of physical layer security research on various promising techniques for 5G era and beyond networks. The number of mobile-connected wireless devices is quickly growing and will reach 11 billion by 2020, exceeding the world’s projected population at that time (7.8 billion). Meanwhile, the demand for wireless data transmission in futuristic wireless networks is growing exponentially. For example, a mobile user is expected to download approximately 1 terabyte of data on average annually by 2020. Cutting-edge wireless-enabled applications, such as e-healthcare, augmented reality, Tactile Internet, and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), are becoming a reality, which is triggering an explosion of mobile data traffic, a rapid increase in the number of end-devices, massive instantaneous end-to-end connections, and high-reliability low-latency services. It will be an extremely daunting task for fourth generation (4G) networks to meet the ever-increasing communication needs, and the aforementioned features have been recognized as essential requirements for the fifth generation (5G) era and beyond.