Each issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC) is devoted to a specific technical topic and thus provides to J-SAC readers a collection of up-to-date papers on that topic. These issues are valuable to the research community and become valuable references. The technical topics covered by J-SAC issues span the entire field of communications and networking. J-SAC publishes only papers that are submitted in response to a Call-for-Papers. These calls are published in J-SAC issues and other publications of the IEEE Communications Society as appropriate to the subject area of the call. Papers submitted for review for possible publication in a J-SAC issue must be submitted to one of the Guest Editors listed in the Call-for-Papers. 

Recent issue themes included:

    Speech and Image Coding.
    Medical Communications.
    HDTV and Digital Video Communications.
    B-ISDN Applications and Economics.
    Wireless Personal Communications.
    Advances in Satellite Communication.
    Fading Channels and Equalization.
    Spread Spectrum.

Special Issue on Advances in Internet Routing and Addressing
Submission Date: 2024-05-31

Applications are placing increasingly sophisticated demands on the network for better quality, more predictability, and greater reliability. Some of these applications are futuristic predictions (for example, holographic conferencing, immersive digital worlds, intelligent industry, telemedicine, automated agriculture, and sensory Internet), while existing applications are already seeing real network demands (such as multiplayer augmented- or virtual-reality games, industrial networking, and distributed AI). This overlaps with a growing trend to extend end-to-end communications to include highly computational processes (e.g., emergent intelligent application), machines and moving objects (such as autonomous cars and drones), while increasing the ability to virtualize and replicate any network or service for improved efficiency and redundancy. Also, new environments, such as beyond 5G, manufacturing, or Non-Terrestrial Networks pose new challenges to the requirements, such as time-variance of connectivity availability. At the same time, integrating connectivity with computational services is seen as another important consideration to improve the overall system’s efficiency and, ultimately, carbon footprint.

In this Special Issue, we solicit work on use cases, design principles, architectures, and techniques, but also insights into implementations and experiments with novel solutions that address the highlighted objectives.

Topics of Interest
- Advanced applications and use case analysis and requirements
- Goals and challenges in future and evolving routing and addressing schemes
- Architecture frameworks for multi-purpose routing
- Domain specific interconnection architectures
- Routing on multiple optimality criteria
- Compute-aware routing and forwarding
- Low latency forwarding techniques
- Time-variable routing and forwarding
- Enhanced host protocol stacks for advanced routing and forwarding solutions
- Routing on new forms of identification
- Coordination of information and decisions across multiple domains (regions & technology layers)
- Routing based on formal routing algebras and regular expressions approaches
- Routing for constrained and intermittently connected environments
- Routing and forwarding based on AI-based methods, such as federated learning
- Centralized and other platforms for routing and addressing architectures
- Routing with modern SDN architectures and protocols
- Programmable forwarding architectures for data and for control.
- Security & Privacy of semantic enhancements
- Scalability analysis of novel routing mechanisms and semantic enhancements
- Economic and game-theoretical analysis of enhanced network semantics
- Stability design and analysis
- Experience and deployment 

Special Issue on Zero Trust for Next-Generation Networking
Submission Date: 2024-05-31

Conventional security architectures and models are considered a single network architecture solution, where devices authenticated within the network are assumed to be implicitly trusted. Such a conventional solution assumes that once devices have been authenticated within the network, are free to access, move, or exfiltrate data. This may introduce security threats and attacks. Although such an approach may be adopted in certain network scenarios, it definitely cannot be applied to NGNs. Zero-Trust security was introduced to overcome these obstacles, in which it does not rely on entry-point authentication, but rather uses context-aware, dynamic, and intelligent authentication schemes to detect and prevent security threats and attacks. Given that zero-trust security is a new security paradigm, little work has been done in this area to secure NGNs using zero-trust models. Zero-trust security models will highly benefit from two elements: threat intelligence and decentralized authentication. Continuous and dynamic trust evaluation is needed to attain high levels of access control in NGN. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) will grant tremendous capabilities for zero-trust architectures to maintain high levels of intrusion detection and prevention. Moreover, through decentralized authentication methods like blockchain, data will both be stored and shared safely.

This Special Issue aims to foster original research and innovative solutions on the above subject to tackle the challenging issues related to security and trust in NGNs. We welcome the dissemination of high-quality research on emerging ideas, approaches, theories, frameworks, and practices of zero-trust in NGNs. Researchers, developers, and industry experts are welcome to submit their work that may focus on fundamental methodological studies or use cases and application demonstrations.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Utilizing zero-trust to secure wireless communication and networks.
- Securing critical infrastructure communication with zero-trust.
- Applying zero-trust for aerial communication and network security.
- Federated Deep Learning-based zero-trust models.
- Distributed and decentralized zero-trust architectures and frameworks for NGN.
- Blockchain-enabled zero-trust architectures and frameworks for NGN.
- Access management and identity authentication using zero-trust in NGN.
- Testing and evaluating zero-trust security in networks.
- Zero-trust for 6G applications and services.
- Security of virtual Environments (e.g., Metaverse) in 6G.
- Conflict detection using AI/ML embedding/representation models.
- Access management for AI/ML model life cycle management in 6G networks.
- Integration of Zero-trust at the physical, data link, and network layers of the OSI model.