The recent growth in cellular technology has led to many innovations for human beings. Uninterrupted data services play a variety of roles in a mobile user’s routine life. Various changing user group patterns are unpredictable, due to the day-by-day upgradation of user devices, for example, one-stop mobile apps. Even though current telecom data services have upgraded up to fifth generation (5G) technology, the backend database systems are still facing serious data service issues.

There is, therefore, a need to design better mechanisms to provide integrated intelligence, simplified network architecture, high bandwidth performance capabilities with on-demand scalability, and enhanced mobility. In these circumstances, 4G cellular networks improve user experience and have created a revolution in networking environments, with an optimized backhaul, converged mobility, and delivery of higher bandwidth services. In addition to these benefits, it also provides a high-speed data rate, enhanced mobility, and reduced latency. Therefore, 4G plays a vital role in providing high-speed data rate when compared to 2G and 3G networks. The components of the 4G-LTE architecture, namely, user equipment (UE), radio access networks (RAN), core networks (CN), evolved packet cores (EPC), the internet, and the content server. Even though current data services have upgraded up to 300Mbps, there are still serious issues facing the backend information and network systems in terms of data service. The support for 5G and Internet of Things (IoT)-based services, such as augmented reality, wearable health devices, mobile machine-to-machine communication (M2M), location-based services, and smart cities, need better algorithms and heterogeneous systems to optimize the experience of the end user.

In this Special Issue, we seek original work focused on addressing new research and development solutions in heterogenous systems and algorithms for next generation information-centric networks. We welcome both original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Adaptive data communication techniques in 5G
• Heterogeneous data communication paradigms
• Augmented algorithms in 5G
• Mobility management in next-gen networks
• Next generation core and access-functional division and interfaces
• Network virtualization techniques
• Synchronization techniques in eNodeB and radio access networks (RAN)
• Software-defined networking
• eNodeB and RAN-aware data replacement techniques
• Power-aware device-to-device (D2D) techniques
• Mobile health applications in IoT
• Image processing algorithms in IoT
• Video-based services in IoT
• Networking backbone architectures for IoT
• Green computing
• Data offloading techniques in 5G
• Authentication solutions for D2D
• Efficient techniques to manage crowdsourced data
• Heterogeneous data synchronization systems for next generation networks
• Location-based data services
• Mobile cloud
• Data management issues in next generation networks