With the advancement of generation mobile and wireless networking technologies, “Smart
healthcare” and/or “Connected Healthcare“ is getting tremendous attention from the academia, the
governments, the industry, and the healthcare community. The next generation mobile and wireless
networking technologies such as 5G wireless networks, mobile-edge computing (MEC), software-defined
networking (SDN), and cloud radio access networks (Cloud RAN), can play a significant role in the smart
healthcare by offering better insight of heterogeneous healthcare media content to support affordable and
quality patient care. While researchers have been making advances to the study of next-generation
networking and healthcare services individually, a very little attention has been given to make cost-
effective and affordable smart healthcare solutions. Connected or smart healthcare has the potential to
revolutionize many aspects of our society; however, many technical challenges need to be addressed
before this potential can be realized. Some of these challenges include How to develop rich and real-time
services or applications for smart healthcare solutions by adopting next generation mobile and wireless
networking technologies? How the next-generation networking technologies can assist with right patient
care at the right time and in the right place? How networking technologies can facilitate healthcare data
representation, storage, analysis and integration for effective smart healthcare solutions? The next-
generation wireless technology that makes highly connected healthcare environments has the potential to
address each of those challenges and can revolutionize the future of connected healthcare services. It is
envisioned that the next-generation networking technologies will be the success factor for realizing the
true vision of smart healthcare since they will contribute to facilitate resource constrained devices to
communicate efficiently, faster data generation and processing as well as for quality data transmission to
stakeholders.

This Feature Topic is intended to report high-quality research on recent advances in various aspects of
the next-generation networking technologies in healthcare services, more specifically to the state-of-the-
art approaches, methodologies and systems in the design, development, deployment and innovative use
of those networking technologies for providing insights into smart healthcare service demands. Authors
are solicited to submit complete unpublished papers in the following topics. Topic includes but not limited to

Cloud RAN for Smart healthcare
 Software defined wireless networks for Smart Healthcare
 Mobile Edge Computing for Smart healthcare
 IoT-cloud for Smart healthcare
 Wireless technologies for connected medicine
 Cyber-physical and socially-aware network for smart healthcare
 Context-aware 5G-supported services for Smart healthcare
 Data security, and privacy for connected healthcare
 Wearable Internet of Things (WIoT) and 5G access technologies for smart healthcare
 Innovative communication protocols, algorithms and test beds for 5G-enable connected healthcare

SUBMISSIONS
Articles should be tutorial in nature and written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty
of the article. Authors must follow IEEE Communications Magazine's guidelines for preparation of the
manuscript. Complete guidelines for prospective authors are found at:
http://www.comsoc.org/commag/paper-submission-guidelines
It is important to note that IEEE Communications Magazine strongly limits mathematical content, and
the number of figures and tables. Paper length (introduction through conclusions) should not exceed
4,500 words. Figures and tables should be limited to a combined total of six. The number of references is
recommended not to exceed 15. All articles to be considered for publication must be submitted through
the IEEE Manuscript Central (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/commag-ieee) by the deadline. Select
"April 2018 / Advances of Next-Generation networking Technologies for Smart Healthcare " as the Feature Topic category for your submission.

IMPORTANT DATES
 Manuscript Submission Deadline:, August 16, 2017
 Decision Notification: December 1, 2017
 Final Manuscript Submission Deadline: January 15, 2018