Radio communications: components, systems, and networks [Guest editorial]

Dear readers: Continuing our series in 2011, our challenge remains: bring timely, highly relevant contributions of a tutorial nature that can bring new ideas and concepts closer to the Communications Society readership. Radio Communications topics are diverse in nature, spanning components and subsystem enabling technologies, physical and radio access layer approaches, and network techniques. The complexity of modern systems brings all of the disciplines together with a crossdisciplinary emphasis, with enabling solutions being distributed across all aspects of the system. Taking the low power challenge (or maybe calling it the green approach) is an excellent example: savings can come from protocol design, low-complexity physical layer algorithms, and efficient implementations all the way to advances in semiconductor technology. Add on top of this energy harvesting as part of the solution, and one can imagine how important a cross-disciplinary approach is today.