About IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC

IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC

IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC is the proceedings series of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, one of the IEEE Communications Society's premier annual events for wireless research. It is a conference proceedings serial, not a conventional journal with rolling submissions and periodic issues. Each annual edition presents peer-reviewed technical papers, together with tutorials, workshops and panels, and the accepted and presented papers are published in that edition's conference proceedings by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in the United States, as shown on the JournalsWorld record, and distributed through IEEE Xplore. The record carries ISSN 1525-3511, an h-index of 98 and an SJR value of 0.555. A related electronic ISSN, 1558-2612, appears on individual recent papers in repositories as the eISSN for the series, while the JournalsWorld and ISSN Portal records centre on 1525-3511 as the principal identifier, with the ISSN Portal listing title proper as IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, variants including WCNC and Conference record, medium print with online availability, and country United States. This profile reports the record's identifier as given and notes the eISSN where it appears on papers, so that readers are not confused when they encounter both numbers in citations.

Identity and what this record represents

WCNC occupies a particular place in the communications conference landscape. The IEEE Communications Society, known as ComSoc, runs a family of major conferences covering communications as a whole and its sub-fields, and WCNC is the member of that family devoted specifically to wireless communications and networking in all its layers, from radio and physical-layer techniques through medium access, networking, services and applications. Official descriptions for recent editions call WCNC one of the premier annual events of IEEE in the wireless research arena, bringing together researchers, academics, industry and government. That mixture is characteristic: wireless is a field in which academic research, industry standardisation, spectrum regulation and product development are tightly linked, and a conference that drew only one of those communities would miss the feedback between theory, standards and deployment that drives progress. The proceedings therefore contain, side by side, information-theoretic and signal-processing work, protocol and architecture papers, experimental and testbed results, and application studies for emerging wireless uses.

For authors, evaluators and librarians the proceedings form matters in the usual ways for computer science and electrical engineering conferences, with added weight from the scale of WCNC. An author submits a complete paper by an annual deadline to a technical track, reviewers in that track assess it, and accepted papers are presented at the meeting and published in the proceedings; there is no journal-style revise-and-resubmit cycle within the same edition. An evaluator should treat a WCNC paper as a peer-reviewed conference publication in a competitive ComSoc venue, recording the year and track, and should not convert its series indicators into a journal impact factor. A librarian or cataloguer should treat each annual proceedings as a volume of a continuing serial identified by the series ISSN and by edition-specific ISBN and IEEE catalog numbers, exemplified by the 2012 Paris edition's catalog entry and by the 2022 and 2024 proceedings volumes, which list ISSN 1525-3511 alongside their own ISBNs for print-on-demand and online versions. The series record groups those volumes so that their collective influence can be seen, while the scholarly record itself remains at paper level.

History and development

WCNC grew out of the IEEE Communications Society's wireless conference activities in the late 1990s, when digital cellular, personal communications services and the full spectrum of supporting wireless technologies were expanding rapidly and needed a dedicated international technical forum. A contemporary industry report from 1999 records the Communications Society's Wireless Communications Conference being held in conjunction with the Personal Communications Showcase in September 1999 in New Orleans, under an agreement between the Personal Communications Industry Association and IEEE ComSoc leadership. From those roots the conference took the name Wireless Communications and Networking Conference and settled into the annual rhythm that its official past-conferences lists document in detail for the twenty-first century. The list published for WCNC 2023 traces editions back through Austin in 2022, a hybrid edition in 2021 and a virtual edition in 2020, Marrakech in 2019, Barcelona in 2018, San Francisco in 2017, Doha in 2016, New Orleans in 2015, Istanbul in 2014, Shanghai in 2013, Paris in 2012, Cancun in 2011, Sydney in 2010, Budapest in 2009, Las Vegas in 2008, Hong Kong in 2007, Las Vegas in 2006, New Orleans in 2005, Atlanta in 2004 and New Orleans in 2003. That is the geography of a genuinely global annual meeting rotating among North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa.

The editions since that list continue the pattern, with Glasgow hosting WCNC 2023 from 26 to 29 March 2023, Dubai and other recent hosts in the mid-2020s cycle, and Milan hosting the 2025 edition from 24 to 27 March 2025 as recorded on author manuscript records for papers in that edition. Over that quarter-century the technical centre of gravity of the proceedings has moved through successive generations of wireless systems. Editions in the early 2000s were dominated by third-generation cellular, wireless local and personal area networks, and the convergence of voice and data. Later editions absorbed fourth-generation LTE and WiMAX questions, cognitive radio, green communications, machine-to-machine communication and the early internet of things. The Paris edition in 2012, for example, was announced with more than 600 technical papers expected and with tutorials and workshops on mobile cloud computing, heterogeneous cellular networks, machine-to-machine communication in smart grids and smart cities, green communications, vehicular communications, cooperation and coordination over cellular networks, internet-of-things enabling technologies and related topics. By the 2019 to 2025 editions the agenda had shifted again, toward fifth-generation systems in deployment, rate-splitting and next-generation multiple access, network slicing and security, edge computing, satellite and hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks, reconfigurable surfaces, sensing and communication integration, and early sixth-generation research, topics visible in the workshop and track structure of the 2022 proceedings table of contents and in the calls for recent editions.

Scale is part of the history as well. The Sydney edition in 2010 was expected to draw about 1,000 industry professionals, academics and government officials for more than 500 workshops, tutorials, panel discussions and technical sessions over four days, with keynotes on the future of wireless communications and the future of the mobile internet. The Shanghai edition in 2013 reported a rigorous review process that included more than 1,000 submissions from scores of countries for a program of hundreds of papers. Numbers of that order, repeated across editions, explain why WCNC functions as an annual census of the wireless field: its table of contents in any given year shows, in aggregate, what problems the worldwide community is working on, which technologies are moving from theory to testbeds, and which application areas, from vehicular networks to health monitoring to rural connectivity, are demanding new wireless solutions.

Scope and topics

The scope of the WCNC proceedings is wireless communications, networks, services and applications in full breadth. Official calls invite submissions in all areas of wireless communications and networks, and organise the technical program into tracks that, while their exact names vary by edition, consistently cover several enduring layers of the subject. One layer is radio and physical-layer communication: modulation, coding, multiple access, multiple-antenna systems including massive MIMO, millimetre-wave and terahertz communication, full duplexing, joint access and backhaul, physical-layer security, and signal processing for communication. A second layer is networking and architecture: cellular and heterogeneous networks, ad hoc, mesh and sensor networks, vehicular networks, device-to-device communication, cognitive and software-defined networking for wireless, network slicing, edge and fog architectures, and protocols for mobility, handover and resource management. Work on handover for high-speed rail, on clustering and base-station cooperation, and on resource allocation in MIMO-OFDM relay networks, all cited in materials for past editions, illustrates the character of this layer, where a protocol or algorithm is judged by performance in a realistic network setting and not only by abstract optimality.

A third layer is services, applications and emerging uses: machine-to-machine communication and the internet of things, wireless for smart grids and smart cities, rural and remote connectivity including satellite-based access and backhaul and hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks, wireless for health, multimedia delivery including edge-based video streaming, localisation and tracking, and testbed and prototype implementation of wireless services, all of which appear explicitly in recent calls and workshop lists. A fourth, cross-cutting layer concerns the conditions for wireless systems to operate in the real world: spectrum sharing and management including hybrid licensed and unlicensed access and licensed-assisted access, energy efficiency and green communication, security and privacy in wireless networks including security for network slices, and the use of machine learning, including reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning, for resource allocation, handover, streaming and other wireless decisions. Papers that apply learning methods are expected, as in other layers, to show a wireless contribution and a credible evaluation, not merely to apply a standard model to a wireless dataset.

Scope fit for a prospective author is therefore best judged by layer and by contribution type. A strong WCNC paper typically offers a new technique, architecture, protocol or analysis with a clear wireless problem at its centre and with evaluation by simulation, analysis, testbed or measurement that matches the claim, using parameters and comparisons that other wireless researchers will recognise as fair. Papers whose wireless element is incidental, whose evaluation uses outdated system assumptions without justification, or whose comparison omits the contemporary methods in the same track are at a disadvantage in review, because the track's reviewers are drawn from the very community that produced those contemporary methods. Conversely, work that connects layers, for example a physical-layer technique evaluated for its network-level consequences, or an application study that reveals a genuine networking requirement, is often welcomed when the call's track structure provides a home for it, and authors should choose their track deliberately and say, in the paper itself, which conversation in the field the work joins.

Publisher, sponsor and editorial structure

WCNC is hosted by the IEEE Communications Society, as stated in official announcements for editions including WCNC 2012, and its proceedings are published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in the United States. ComSoc's role is more than nominal: the society provides the conference's place in the IEEE conference calendar, its standards for peer review and publication, and its connection to the wider communications community, including the technical committees whose members form much of the reviewer pool. The scholarly leadership of each edition is a conference organising structure, renewed annually, comprising general chairs, technical program chairs, and track chairs and technical program committee members who manage review within their areas, together with workshop, tutorial and panel chairs for the non-paper parts of the program. The 2019 edition's published leadership illustrates the pattern and its international character, with an executive general chair based in Finland, technical program chairs based in the United States, Hong Kong and Brazil, and a steering committee chair based in Hong Kong. That pattern, senior researchers from several continents sharing responsibility for a single edition, is the norm for WCNC and is one reason the meeting's program reflects the field globally rather than regionally.

Because leadership is edition-specific, this profile does not present a permanent editor-in-chief or a standing editorial board for the series, and readers should be cautious of any directory that does so for a conference of this kind. The authoritative source for who led a given edition, who served on its technical program committee and what its submission and notification dates were is that edition's official site, in the ieee-wcnc.org family of sites, and the front matter of its proceedings. The steering function for the series as a whole, which maintains continuity between editions and oversees the choice of future hosts, is a ComSoc conference function rather than a journal masthead, and its membership likewise changes over time. For the purposes of understanding a paper, the details that matter and that can be recorded reliably are the edition, the year, the track where it is given, and the fact of peer review under that edition's technical program committee.

Frequency, format and identifiers

WCNC is an annual conference, usually held in the spring, over about four days including workshops and tutorials, and its proceedings follow that annual cadence, with one principal proceedings volume per edition. The series ISSN on this record is 1525-3511, confirmed by the ISSN Portal record for the title and by its appearance on proceedings volumes and individual papers, including the 2012, 2022 and 2024 editions. Papers in recent editions also show eISSN 1558-2612 alongside the principal ISSN, as on repository records for Glasgow 2023 and Milan 2025 papers, reflecting the online medium of the proceedings in IEEE Xplore. Each edition carries its own ISBNs and IEEE catalog number, and each paper carries its own digital object identifier, as shown for example by the DOI recorded for a 2023 WCNC paper on handover for high-speed rail wireless communications and for a 2025 paper on deep reinforcement learning for edge-based video streaming. Citations should therefore give the paper's authors and title, the conference name and year, and the DOI or page information from IEEE Xplore, with the series ISSN used for the serial as a whole rather than as a substitute for the paper citation.

The indicators on the record, an h-index of 98 and an SJR value of 0.555, describe a large, well-cited annual proceedings. An h-index approaching one hundred for a conference series means that, on the counting method of the source supplying the indicator, at least 98 papers in the series have each been cited at least 98 times, a substantial accumulation that reflects both the size of WCNC and the centrality of its topics to a fast-growing field over two decades. The SJR value is a Scopus-based, prestige-weighted indicator for the source, suitable for rough comparison with peer communications proceedings and journals, but it is not a Clarivate journal impact factor and should not be reported as one. Institutions that require a value for a particular year should take it from the current SCImago or Scopus source record for that year, because directory values may lag the most recent ranking cycle. Neither indicator, on its own, describes the quality of an individual paper, whose reception should be judged from its own citations, its track and edition, and its influence on subsequent work and standardisation.

Peer review and author guidance

Peer review at WCNC is technical-program-committee review of complete papers submitted by the deadline in the edition's call, historically through the EDAS submission system named in official calls for editions including 2021. Reviewers assess originality, technical soundness, significance to wireless communications and networking, clarity, and the adequacy of the evaluation, and track chairs and technical program chairs build the program from those reviews under the constraint of presentation capacity. Official materials for past editions describe the process as rigorous and report submission volumes above one thousand in some years for a program of hundreds of papers, which implies substantial selectivity, although no single acceptance rate is published as a permanent property of the series and any year-specific figure should be sourced from that edition's official report. Accepted and presented papers are published in the edition's conference proceedings, a condition stated explicitly in calls including the 2019 call, which links publication in the proceedings to acceptance and presentation.

Author guidance is published for each edition in its call for papers and author instructions, and it controls over any general description, because deadlines, page limits, formatting, anonymisation where it applies, and policies on prior and simultaneous submission, authorship changes and presentation requirements are edition-specific. The published rhythm for a recent cycle is illustrated by the 2019 edition's dates, with a paper submission deadline in September 2018, notification in December 2018 and camera-ready submission in January 2019 ahead of the spring conference, a pattern of roughly six months from submission to meeting that authors should plan around for the edition they target. In general IEEE conference terms, papers are prepared in the IEEE conference format, submitted as PDF in the system named in the call, and must be presented by an author at the conference for the paper to remain in the proceedings. Practical guidance that transfers across editions is to follow the current wireless evaluation conventions of the chosen track, including realistic channel, traffic and deployment assumptions, comparison to the strongest recent baselines in the same setting, sufficient detail on parameters for reproduction, and honest discussion of complexity, energy, latency or deployment costs where the claim depends on them. Wireless reviewers are particularly alert to evaluations that gain performance by assuming away a central difficulty of the setting, and a paper that confronts that difficulty directly, even with a more modest gain, usually fares better.

Indexing, archiving and discoverability

WCNC proceedings are published and archived in IEEE Xplore, the principal version of record, which provides abstracts, paper-level identifiers, references and citation information. The series is tracked as a source in Scopus-based ranking services, as the SCImago indicators on this record show, and its editions are widely listed in computer science and engineering bibliographies, including DBLP, and in university repositories where authors deposit their manuscript versions under IEEE posting policy, as the White Rose repository records for WCNC 2023 and 2025 papers illustrate. Those repository records are useful for discovery and for confirming bibliographic details, including ISSN, eISSN, ISBN and DOI for a specific paper, but the version of record remains the proceedings version in IEEE Xplore, and readers should cite that version. Where a formal purpose requires indexing in a particular service, the specific paper and edition should be verified directly in that service, since conference indexing can vary and a series-level directory record cannot guarantee an individual item.

Preservation and access follow IEEE's digital library arrangements. Many WCNC papers are also the starting point for extended work in ComSoc journals such as transactions and magazines in wireless and communications, where longer treatments with fuller analysis, systems detail or measurement campaigns may later appear as separate publications. Such a journal article is not the same publication as the conference paper and should be cited separately, with the relationship disclosed as the journal requires. The conference paper retains its standing as the peer-reviewed, presented record of the work at that date, and in a field whose technology generations turn over in a few years, the date fixed by the proceedings is itself important information for anyone tracing when a technique was proposed, tested or first shown at scale.

Standing, use and limitations

WCNC's standing rests on its longevity as an annual ComSoc event, its scale, its global rotation of hosts, and its coverage of the whole wireless stack at the moment when successive generations of systems were being researched, standardised and deployed. For a researcher entering a wireless topic, a productive approach is to review the last three editions' programs in the chosen track, note which problems and evaluation settings recur, and then read the most cited and most recent papers on the precise question before designing new work. For an industry or government reader, the proceedings are a survey instrument: workshop themes, keynote topics and panel subjects in a given year, from cognitive radio and green communication in earlier editions to network slicing security, satellite integration and next-generation multiple access in recent ones, signal where the research community expects deployment pressure next. For a student, the proceedings offer compact, peer-reviewed introductions to active problems, best read alongside the standards documents, textbooks and journal surveys that give those problems their wider context.

Some facts are not stated in this profile as fixed series values because they could not be verified as permanent properties from official sources. A single current acceptance rate, a single current page limit, a permanent chair or board list and a journal-style impact factor do not exist as stable facts for WCNC; each belongs to an edition or to a ranking year. The founding account is also stated with care: contemporary reporting documents the Communications Society wireless conference activity in New Orleans in 1999 from which WCNC developed, and official lists document the WCNC editions in detail from the early 2000s onward, so this profile does not assert a more precise founding claim than those sources support. What is firmly established and is recorded above is the identity of the conference and its proceedings, hosting by the IEEE Communications Society, publication by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in the United States, the series ISSN 1525-3511 with eISSN 1558-2612 appearing on recent papers, the annual cadence and global host rotation documented in official past-conference lists, the breadth of scope in official calls, and the indicators on the record, h-index 98 and SJR 0.555.

In summary, the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC, ISSN 1525-3511, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in the United States, is the archival proceedings of a premier annual IEEE Communications Society conference that has followed wireless communication from the personal communications era through third, fourth and fifth generation systems toward sixth-generation research. Its papers span radio and physical-layer methods, networking and architectures, services and applications, and the spectrum, energy, security and learning questions that cut across them. It should be used, cited and evaluated as a competitive, peer-reviewed conference proceedings series, with edition, track and paper-level detail recorded, and with edition-specific facts taken from the official WCNC site and proceedings for the year in question.