As the core of the next generation of communication, 5G delivers a transformative solution to an ultimate high-quality end-user experience. It supports various innovations and applications and helps develop new business models and services. Such a high-speed, high-capacity, low-latency 5G networks can well meet the demands of increasing data-intensive applications in the current IoT and AI era. 5G and related techniques also support a massive number of devices that can simultaneously access the system and directly improve the quality of customer service. Its gigabit speeds, highly-improved network performance, and reliability characteristics are motivating several research directions and applications from both industry and academia, and it is expected that current network architectures can make the changes to support 5G accordingly.

Meanwhile, increasing research based on artificial intelligence techniques is being investigated, such as recent solutions for intelligent network monitoring, automatic resource allocation, or learning-based congestion control. Furthermore, such successful attempts motivate a novel concept referred to as ‘knowledge defined networking’. Instead of using an AI-supported solution to deal with a single network scenario, knowledge defined networking aims to shift the entire network design towards self-consciousness and self-management. Knowledge defined networking could be a bridge to combine network information from various aspects. Such an intelligent control loop will provide automation, recommendation, optimization, validation, and estimation to resolve the technical challenges that 5G brings.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collate articles related to knowledge defined networking for 5G. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Knowledge defined network architecture, protocol, and resource management solutions for 5G
• Automatic topology reconfiguration for 5G
• Novel network monitoring solutions based on SDN for 5G
• Machine learning-based solutions for 5G network slicing
• Knowledge defined networking-based data center network resource management and routing optimization for 5G
• AI-assisted knowledge defined networking orchestration for 5G
• Knowledge defined networking-based network function virtualization
• Knowledge defined networking-based solutions for network scheduling
• Knowledge defined networking-supported solutions to defend security threats in 5G