Wireless communications and networking in extreme environments such as underwater, underground, rural areas, intra-body, in flight and in space have been attracting growing interest from both academia and industry in an effort to conquer the last frontier for wireless technologies. In recent years, underwater wireless networks have attracted significant attention for military and commercial applications including oceanographic data collection, disaster prevention, tactical surveillance, offshore exploration, and pollution monitoring. Unmanned aerial systems that are autonomously networked can assist humans in extreme or difficult-to-reach environments as well as provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Underground wireless networks could enable applications such as precision agriculture, pipeline fault diagnosis, mine disaster rescue, concealed border patrol, and crude oil exploration, among others. Wireless networked systems of intra-body sensors and actuators could play a key role on real-time monitoring and medical treatment of chronic diseases such as diabetes, as well as enable automated drug administration and targeted drug delivery. Satellite (mega-)constellations could improve communications and ongoing monitoring of Earth phenomena ranging from weather and climate to disaster management. Rural areas remain underserved by increasingly core societal applications.


Despite the obvious differences, underwater, aerial, underground, intra-body, rural and space wireless networks share common core research challenges that arise from the harsh nature of the propagation medium (fading, absorption, scattering, multipath) and the inaccessible nature of the environment. As a result, conventional communication and networking techniques do not “scale up” in extreme communication environments mainly due to the excessive propagation losses of traditional wireless technologies and the financial limitations of operating far from “grids”. The goal of the WCNEE workshop, now in its 6th edition, is to bring together academic researchers and industrial players to share their research findings and technical contributions, from the physical all the way to the application layer in realizing underwater, aerial, underground, intra-body, rural and space wireless communication networks with a focus on bridging the gaps between theory, algorithms, prototypes, testbeds, demonstration and production networks. WCNEE will also facilitate discussions about modeling and characterizing propagation and wireless network performance in such diverse environments based on real-world data measurements.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

AI/ML applied to wireless systems
AI/ML for control and management of networks of networks with heterogeneous requirements
Adversarial learning and operation of autonomous wireless systems
Spectrum sharing and coexistence in licensed and unlicensed frequency bands
Security and privacy mechanisms for data sharing in extreme environments
Hardware-reduced software-defined radios
Low-power wireless systems
Ad-hoc infrastructure-less cross-layer networking, routing, handover and meshing
RF/Acoustic/Optical/Visible-light communication systems
Autonomously networked mobile or static (implantable in a living tissue or in a reservoir) communications system designs
Cooperation of robotic unmanned vehicles with multi-domain (sea-land-air) capabilities
Self-driving self-sustainable wireless networks
Distributed mobile multi-function wireless systems for joint communications and sensing
Localization, detection, classification and tracking methods
Energy harvesting and wireless power transfer systems
Experimental testbeds and measurements from prototypes and real-world wireless (underwater, aerial, intra-body, underground, rural, space) network deployments
Signal propagation and attenuation models