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During the past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the ubiquitous computing with multitude of applications built around various types of sensors. A vast amount of activity is seen in IoT based product-lines and this activity is expected to grow in years to come with projections as high as billions of devices with on average 6-7 devices per person by year 2020. With most of the issues at device and protocol levels solved during the past decade, there is now a growing trend in integration of sensors and sensor based systems with cyber physical systems and device-to-device (D2D) communications. 5 th generation wireless systems (5G) are on the horizon and IoT is taking the center stage as devices are expected to form a major portion of this 5G network paradigm. IoT technologies such as machine to machine communication complemented with intelligent data analytics are expected to drastically change landscape of various industries. The emergence of cloud computing and its extension to fog paradigm with proliferation of intelligent 'smart' devices is expected to lead further innovation in IoT. These developments excite us and form a motivation to survey existing work, design new techniques, and identify new applications of IoT. Researchers, scientists, and engineers face emerging challenges in designing IoT based systems that can efficiently be integrated with the 5G wireless communications.We received enthusiastic response to our special issue call for papers. A total of nine high quality papers were received out of which only seven were selected after a thorough review process. Invited articles were sought from two highly cited and accomplished researchers. Dr. Mischa Dohler (Fellow IEEE, Kings College London, UK) and Dr. Mung Chiang (Fellow IEEE, Princeton University, USA).The first article ''MIMO-NOMA design for small packet transmission in the Internet of Things'', written by a collaborative team of researchers Ding et al.,, opportunistic serving mechanism is designed as part of the effort in the novel paradigm of Multiple Input Multiple Output Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access transmission scheme. Under the proposed method, one user is completely served with their quality of service requirements completely taken care of whereas second user is served opportunistically under the NOMA paradigm. The main contribution of this article is a design with two sets of system parameters, precoding and power allocation coefficients, in order to ensure that the potential of NOMA can be realized even if the users' channel conditions are similar. Two types of power allocation policies are developed in this paper. One is to meet first user's QoS

In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of scheduling of a smart home appliance operation in a given time range. In addition to power-consuming appliances, we adopt a photovoltaic (PV) panel as a power-producing appliance that acts as a micro-grid. An appliance operation is modeled in terms of uninterruptible sequence phases, given in a load demand profile with a goal of minimizing electricity cost fulfilling duration, energy requirement, and user preference constraints. An optimization algorithm, which can provide a schedule for smart home appliance usage, is proposed based on the mixed-integer programming technique. Simulation results demonstrate the utility of our proposed solution for appliance scheduling. We further show that adding a PV system in the home results in the reduction of electricity bills and the export of energy to the national grid in times when solar energy production is more than the demand of the home. INDEX TERMSAppliance scheduling, optimization, branch-and-bound, smart home network, smart grid. AHMED SHAHARYAR KHWAJA received the B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Topi, Pakistan, and the Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in signal processing and telecommunications from the University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the WIN-

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