This paper investigates the synergy between 6G and AI. It argues that they can unlock future horizons, by discussing how they can address future challenges in healthcare, transportation, virtual reality, education, resource management, robotics, in addition to public safety and warfare. However, these great opportunities come also with greater risk. Therefore, the paper provides an overview of the security risks and challenges, along with possible mitigation techniques.

Providing connectivity to around half of the world population living in rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but also a unique opportunity. Access to the internet would provide the population living in these areas a possibility to progress on the educational, health, environment, and business levels. In this paper, a survey of technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, and that can help address this challenge, is provided. Although access/fronthaul and backhaul techniques are discussed in the paper, it is noted that the major limitation for providing connectivity to rural and underprivileged areas is the cost of backhaul deployment. In addition, energy requirements and cost efficiency of the studied technologies are analyzed. In fact, the challenges faced for deploying an electricity network, as a prerequisite for deploying communication networks, are huge in these areas and they are granted an important share of the discussions in this paper. Furthermore, typical application scenarios in rural areas are discussed, and several country-specific use cases are surveyed. The main initiatives by key international players aiming to provide rural connectivity are also described. Moreover, directions for future evolution of rural connectivity are outlined in the paper. Although there is no single solution that can solve all rural connectivity problems, building gradually on the current achievements in order to reach ubiquitous connectivity, while taking into account the particularities of each region and tailoring the solution accordingly, seems to be the most suitable path to follow.

To meet the increasing demands for passenger data rates, modern railway communication networks face significant challenges. The advent of 5G communications after the long-term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems provides several technological advances to address these challenges. In this paper, after reviewing the main 5G communication aspects for modern railways, we present methods to ensure connectivity and energy efficiency for the passengers’ user equipment (UE) through the use of mobile relays (MRs) on top of the train wagons in conjunction with intelligent resource allocation. Relevant challenges to train connectivity are also presented, and suitable solutions are outlined.

In this paper, internet of things (IoT) connectivity in rural areas is investigated. Both fronthaul and backhaul considerations are studied. First, intelligent radio resource management (RRM) and network planning techniques are discussed for IoT access/fronthaul networks. The proposed RRM scheduling approach was shown to lead to good performance in scheduling IoT devices. Then, several backhauling techniques for providing connectivity to rural areas are investigated and their cost efficiency is analyzed. Techniques based on free space optics with solar powered devices are found to be a suitable backhaul solution.

Providing connectivity to around half of the World population living in rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but also a unique opportunity. In this paper, a survey of technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, and that can help address this challenge, is provided. Fronthaul and backhaul techniques are discussed. In addition, energy and cost efficiency of the studied technologies are analyzed. Typical application scenarios in rural areas are discussed, and several country-specific use cases are surveyed. Directions for future evolution of rural connectivity are outlined.