Due to great progress in the antenna and radio frequency (RF) techniques, wireless communication networks have been widely applied in many areas, such as smart cities, industrial internet of things, and information technology of medicine. As a typical form of wireless communication networks, smart grid networks have received a lot of attention from both academia and industry. To support the development and application of smart grid networks, deep low-complexity multi-antenna relaying technology has been recently proposed by researchers to cope with the dynamic network structure of the smart grid networks. Compared with the conventional fixed relaying communication such as amplify-and-forward, decode-and-forward, and denoise-and-forward, deep relaying can dynamically change according to the dynamic network structure with a much lower implementation complexity, and help reduce the RF cost significantly.

However, several critical challenges still exist in the design of deep low-complexity multi-antenna relaying for smart grid networks. The first challenge is the complicated system performance evaluation, which should be performed by jointly incorporating the performance metrics of RF cost, data rate, latency and energy consumption in an intelligent approach. The second challenge is the multi-antenna transmission of the deep low-complexity relaying for smart grid networks, where some intelligent algorithms such as deep learning and federated learning should be developed to devise an intelligent multi-antenna transmission scheme. The third challenge is the much more complicated system resource management in the intelligent relaying based smart grid networks, where multi-dimensional system resources should be jointly exploited in an intelligent approach, in order to reduce the RF cost.

To address the above major challenges in smart grid networks, this Special Issue aims to provide a new comprehensive overview on intelligent multi-antenna relaying and create more ideas on deep low-complexity multi-antenna relaying and RF cost for smart grid networks. This Special Issue will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and governmental agencies to promote the research and development that pertain to this cutting-edge research topic. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Deep multi-antenna relaying protocols
• Advanced multi-antenna transmission schemes for smart grid networks
• Intelligent performance evaluation
• Cross-layer design of smart grid networks
• Intelligent resource management
• Deep learning-based multi-antenna relaying protocols
• Intelligent characteristics extraction for dynamic network structure
• Industrial internet of things, federate learning, transfer learning
• Implementation issues of smart grid networks
• Advanced RF technology
• Front-end RF circuits
• 12-RF cost of multiple antennas