IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 30, NO. 4, MAY 2012 673 Guest Editorial Broadband Wireless Communications for High Speed Vehicles Yiqing Zhou, Fumiyuki Adachi, Xiaodong Wang, Athanassios Manikas, Xi Zhang, and Weiping Zhu W ITH the development of mobile communication sys- tems such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), WiMax and International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced, broadband wireless multimedia services will undoubtedly be popular in the near future. Meanwhile, vehicles with increased speeds, such as high speed trains which exceed 300km/hour, play an increasingly important role in peoples’ lives. These ve- hicles provide fast, convenient and green public transportation systems with a relatively stable and spacious environment for long distance travel. There will be a strong demand for Broad- band Wireless Communications (BWC) to deliver information and onboard entertainment services to passengers using these high speed vehicles. Moreover, BWC is also imperative in vehicle controlling systems to provide operational information such as fault sensor measurements and diagnostics, video surveillance, and so on. The impetus for this special issue has been spurred by the strong demand for BWC in high speed vehicles. The narrowband wireless systems currently used are designed for safe and efficient operation of the vehicle only, and cannot meet the requirements for high speed data transmission, which is necessary to provide multimedia services. Furthermore, con- ventional BWC systems are optimized for low mobility. New BWC systems must be designed which are tailored towards high mobility and which can provide passenger information and onboard entertainment services. Not only will this increase the flexibility of these systems, it will also provide potential new sources of revenue. Interesting research questions and various challenges arise when designing BWC systems for high speed vehicles. Firstly, a new network structure is needed since the current scheme, which involves the direct transmission between the passenger and land-base-station, makes the received signal inside the vehicle significantly deteriorated by the metal shell of the vehicle. Novel communication schemes and radio resource management algorithms should be developed accordingly. Although BWC for high speed vehicles can be based on Y. Zhou is with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China F. Adachi is with Tohoku University, Japan X. Wang is with Columbia University, USA A. Manikas is with Imperial College London, UK X. Zhang is with Texas A&M University, College Station, USA W. Zhu is with Concordia University, Canada Laurence B. Milstein is the J-SAC Board Representative for this issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSAC.2012.1200501 non-cellular networks such as distributed antenna systems, it is widely accepted that a promising BWC solution may be a cooperation with cellular LTE and LTE-A networks. When high speed vehicles move through cellular networks, a serious issue is the frequent handovers and drop-offs which must be addressed. Hence, one big challenge is to design fast and reliable handover and random access schemes. Moreover, considering the physical layer techniques of BWC for high speed vehicles, there is a strong need to evaluate the effect of Doppler spread. BWC for high speed vehicles is a pressing research topic that has huge applications. It is timely and important to develop the key techniques relating to this. The goal of this JSAC issue is to bring together research contributions that describe original and unpublished work addressing BWC for high speed vehicles. The Call for Papers attracted 43 submissions worldwide. After a rigorous review process, 15 papers have been selected for publication. The 15 accepted papers are divided into four categories. The first part has one tutorial paper, addressing main challenges encountered in BWC for high speed vehicles and proposing possible solutions based on distributed antenna systems. The second category is composed of two papers, dealing with physical layer techniques critical to BWC for high speed vehicles such as inter-carrier interference whitening and channel estimation in fast fading channels. The third part contains 11 papers, addressing radio resource management techniques developed for high speed vehicle scenarios, such as handover, scheduling and resource allocation. The final section has one paper, dealing with field measurement and channel modeling of BWC channels for high speed trains. The Guest Editors would like to thank all the authors for their submissions and the reviewers for their high-quality reviews and helpful suggestions to the authors on improving the content and presentation of the papers. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Professor Laurence Milstein (IEEE JSAC Board) and Dr. Martha Steenstrup (IEEE JSAC Editor-in-Chief) for their support and help in bringing forward this special issue. 0733-8716/12/$25.00 c  2012 IEEE