Telecommunication Systems and Technologies

It is more than manifest how and to what extent the widespread availability of telecommunication systems and technologies had (and is still having nowadays) a tremendous impact on the evolution of business, culture, and daily life of most people in the world. Telephone systems, distributed computing systems, and recently the rapid strong convergence of the two domains of telecommunication and computer networks play a crucial role for the living standards of humankind and for the possibility to evolve towards a society where services are the center of economic wealth production. In this perspective, telecommunications are also decisive to give opportunities to reduce the economic gap among different parts of the world and to smooth unfairness in the access to a real global market. Given their crucial role and the convergence trend described throughout the theme, telecommunication systems and technologies today include several inter-related aspects from different research fields and disciplines, from technology innovations to system-level management issues, from traditional resource management, metering, and accounting to the provisioning of innovative services and the associated novel business models, from standardization and integration concerns to regulatory aspects. That multi-disciplinarity suggests the need for a comprehensive multi-faceted overview of the whole telecommunication world, with the aim of both allowing the in-depth understanding of the domain by people with different background/expertise and stimulating cross-fertilized novel ideas for proficient telecommunication evolution.