It is an incredible honor and privilege to be appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of Telecommunication Systems (TELS), a world-class journal with a long and prestigious history of publishing high-quality papers in the telecommunication field since 1993.

The success of TELS is due to the cumulative efforts and perseverance of previous EIC, Prof. Ben Gavish, as well as a wonderful team of advisory board, editorial board members, reviewers, and the Springer’s editorial and publishing staff. I am grateful for their excellent work and hope to maintain and possibly improve the high standards already achieved by them. I would also like to thank the TELS EIC Search Committee and Springer for giving me this excellent opportunity to serve the community in this capacity.

As the new EIC, I have some plans as follows:

Online Submission and Peer-Review System:

It is the first priority to implement an online paper submission and peer-review system, which will definitely help us all and improve our productivity and efficiency in the editorial process. The work is in process and I promise to come up with this system as soon possible.

Deal with Huge Backlog of Papers:

Every author wants his/her paper to be published as soon as possible after the final acceptance, which is indeed a legitimate desire and need. However, impediments or constraints usually obstruct academic journals to fulfill the desires of all authors, for which some of the main reasons are the huge backlog of papers, page limits of journals, and limited issues and volumes each year. Being the new EIC, I also have this grand challenge to deal with. I am trying my level best to efficiently manage this huge backlog of papers, but it cannot be done overnight and I appreciate patience and cooperation of authors in this regard.

Revision of Aims, Scope & Topics:

I personally feel that TELS needs a revision of scope and topics to cover new and emerging areas and technological advancements. There is a great surge of research in the telecommunication field worldwide and convergence of this field with other technological advancements allow us to consider several hot topics and areas to cover a wide audience. I take this opportunity to ask your inputs and suggestions in this regard.

Use of Social Media:

I would like to harness the power of social media in promoting TELS and keep in touch with all the stakeholders for their inputs and suggestions to increase the visibility and impression of this journal. Firstly, we are starting with Twitter for this purpose and we will use more channels of social media in the upcoming future. Here, I invite all to join us at https://twitter.com/telecomspringer.

I am excited by the opportunities the journal will have to review and publish research on the burgeoning field of telecommunication.

I look forward to working with the advisory board, editorial board members, reviewers, authors, readers, and editorial staff to further the mission of the journal. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to invite all to share comments and suggestions on how to further enhance the journal’s quality, visibility and impact to the wider research community and how to move TELS to the next level of excellence. I look forward for a bright future of TELS.

Muhammad Khurram Khan

Editor-in-Chief