Machine and robotic networking [Guest Editorial]

The advances in communication networking technologies have been successful in academia, industry, and consumer markets. "Being connected" becomes an essential part of our daily life. Regarding wireless communications, we have reached a new turning point, where Long Term Evolution (LTE) started commercial service in many countries and smart phones are rapidly spreading out in the market. We believe there will be four essential components that support future wireless systems and applications: user experience, user interface, connectivity, and clouds. The user experience goes far beyond our forecast. Users continuously need not just human-to-human (H2H) information exchange, but also machine-to-human (M2H), device-to-device (D2D), and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The spatial and temporal connectivity becomes a key engineering task, where one single system cannot achieve both connectivity and high capacity. Instead, heterogeneous wireless systems coexist to provide spectrally efficient and economical services. With constraints on memory and computing power of mobile terminals, the cloud servers are now core parts of networking in academia and industry.