The cellular communications landscape is changing very rapidly. Many cellular service providers have announced ambitious plans to upgrade their current 3G networks to Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE Advanced. Advantages provided by LTE/LTE-Advanced networks include high bit rates (on the order of 100 Mbps), low latency (10 milliseconds radio access network round-trip delay), and support for multiple carrier bandwidths as well as enhanced IP-based network architecture and low operating costs.

The purpose of this special issue is to provide readers with an up-to-date view of current developments in LTE/LTE Advanced, with a focus on the physical and medium access control layers and network management issues. Review papers as well as papers describing original work are solicited. Topics to be covered include, but are not limited to:

• Downlink and uplink physical layer designs and implementations, including beamforming and spatial multiplexing
• MAC scheduling, radio resource allocation, frequency selective feed-backs, control channel constraints, link adaptation, HARQ
• Radio resource management (RRM), including admission control, congestion control, load balancing, handover, power control/management, mobility, intrafrequency, interfrequency, and inter-RAT handover
• Intercell interference coordination (ICIC), including fractional frequency reuse and cooperative interference mitigation techniques
• Multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS)
• Cooperative wireless networks, including relaying, network coding, and multiuser MIMO techniques
• LTE network planning, management, optimization, and deployment methodologies
• Self-organizing networks, including self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-planning
• Artificial intelligence based self-organization
• Network management automation

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: