One of the major challenges facing the fifth generation of mobile telephony is the need to connect tens of billions of objects while also dealing with the increased traffic on radio access networks that is anticipated in the future. Excellent solutions well-suited to relatively low throughput communications and moderate connected object densities currently exist, such as Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communications (LTE-M), Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), and Long Range (LoRa) standards. However, if the massive deployment of the Internet of Things (Massive IoT) continues to accelerate, these current solutions could reach their limits and potentially trigger a sharp increase in radio interference levels, meaning data packets may not be properly decoded and video quality could be affected. For example, connected 4K cameras are likely to be impacted as they sporadically generate high transmission rates.

Interference management has been discussed extensively in relation to cellular networks and wireless networks, but the levels and characteristics of the radio interference expected to be generated by Massive IoT deployments will be unique and thus require new approaches. Considering these future scenarios is the main purpose of this special issue. Several areas are likely to be impacted. For starters, the waveforms best suited to sporadic broadband will need to be identified. Strong constraints on latency will be induced by video transmissions, resulting in the likely introduction of new coding schemes. Other issues to tackle include those relating to spectrum surveys, access to the transmission channel, and allocation of radio resources. Finally, the fight against sporadic interference will also need to be prioritized.

This special issue therefore intends to showcase research that anticipates and addresses the potential problems posed by future use cases of Massive IoT deployments. The goal of the proposed special issue is to present the latest original scientific research efforts as well as review articles that describe the state of the art in these areas.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Interference mitigation, cancellation, and alignment solutions for Massive IoT
• Spectrum sharing, shaping, and sensing for sporadic IoT transmissions
• Nonorthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for IoT, including Power-Domain NOMA (PD-NOMA) and Single-Carrier NOMA (SC-NOMA)
• Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and IoT
• Waveforms for Massive IoT
• Resource allocation for sporadic transmissions
• New low latency coding schemes for high throughput connected objects
• Time reversal and spatial modulation for IoT
• Frequency planning for IoT networks
• Network coding and physical layer network coding for IoT
• Impact of objects’ hardware impairments on radio interference levels
• IoT field tests and measurements