IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Communications in Harsh Environments

Communication systems deployed in harsh environments, such as high-speed trains, subways, deserts, trenches, forests, and underground mines, should be specially constructed to withstand extreme conditions such as high or low temperatures, corrosive humidity, extreme weather, or excessive dust and dirt. Such applications require specially designed wireless communication, fiber-optic communications, satellite communication, or signal processing techniques that can perform under extreme conditions and meet the QoS, security, and reliability requirements. Quite often, communications in harsh environments have an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), high Doppler shift, and long latency, and often consume more power and energy. Bandwidth limitation in harsh environments requires spectrum efficient communications. The current state of art technologies such as massive MIMO, advanced modulation and channel coding, artificial intelligence, and signal processing provide different venues to explore this challenging area.