First of all, I would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year. As we prepare to embark on a new year, we set new goals, aims and resolutions or just try to bring a new outlook to our life and work. I remember a famous quote of Henry Ward Beecher, “Every man should be born again on the first day of January”. Hence, it is the time to lay the foundation for a productive new year again!

As usual, 2016 was another busy year in which, everyone involved tried their level best in contributing to the further growth and quality of the journal. We should feel proud that Telecommunication Systems (TELS) is experiencing continuous progress in all dimensions. All credit goes to the readers, authors, reviewers, editors, advisory board, editorial staff, and production department, etc.

Journal’s turnaround time from submission to the first decision notification remained 62.5 days in 2016, and we would try to minimize it in 2017 as much as we can. The quality of the published contents is always a paramount concern therefore, TELS has recently started to perform a rigorous quality check to ensure the originality of the submissions. Our editorial staff performs a similarity check through plagiarism detection tools, and papers with high similarity index are rejected or advised to revise accordingly. I would like to pay my gratitude to Springer and its staff who were very kind to accept my request for integrating plagiarism detection tools with TELS.

TELS received an overwhelming number of submissions in 2016, consequently some new editorial board members joined the journal to handle the reviewing process in an efficient and smooth manner. Please welcome new advisory and editorial board members and join me to pay gratitude to those who resigned and left TELS in 2016. We sincerely wish that our new editorial board members would play a significant role in improving the quality and contents of the journal.

The journal’s editorial office, associate editors and publishing staff work hard to identify and sharpen the presentation of submitted papers for the benefit of authors and readers alike. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the editorial board members and reviewers for their timely review reports, critical assessment of the submitted manuscripts, and useful comments. It is needless to say that TELS cannot hope to fulfill the need and standard of the readers without their dedicated and contributory efforts. This is a vital and commendable volunteer service to both the academic scholarship and the practice.

I look forward to your valuable research contributions to TELS and ensure to do everything at my level best to optimize the impact and quality of the journal. Please don’t hesitate to contact me anytime if you have some suggestions for improvements. Once again, I wish you and your family a happy, healthy, prosperous, productive, and fruitful new year!

Muhammad Khurram Khan, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief

Telecommunication Systems (Springer)

King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

Email: mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa