It’s a matter of immense pleasure to extend my heartiest greetings and best wishes of new year to all the readers, contributors, reviewers, editorial and advisory board members, production, and publishing staff of Telecommunication Systems (TELS). New year is always a joyous time to refresh ourselves and build new plans for the productive and impactful contributions. It is a time to embrace positive things that could bring new opportunities in our life! As usual, the preceding year was tough and brought many new challenges to TELS. However, we are fortunate to have a wonderful team who helped to turn those challenges into opportunities.

We have always tried our level best to do our utmost in improving the overall performance and quality of the journal. This improvement could reflect by different parameters which indeed need a lot of efforts, energies, and enthusiasm from all the stakeholders. The new strides towards success are quite challenging but they also have ample of opportunities. One of the most important aspects for authors and a daunting task for a journal is to commit to a prompt decision notification on the submitted work. We always pay close attention on decreasing the average turn around time without compromising the quality of the reviews. In 2017, the average turn around time from submission to the first decision has been minimized up to 44.6 days, which is indeed a good step and its credit goes to the editorial board members as well as the reviewers.

Journal Impact factor is a commonly used indicator to evaluate the output of a journal, however, it shouldn’t be solely and merely used to reflect the true impact. The recent impact factor of TELS, as published in JCR 2017 by Clarivate Analytics, has been improved considerably from 0.822 (JCR 2016) to 1.542, which is almost double! It shows that high-quality work published in TELS is gaining much attention by others.

The number of submissions, which can also be regarded as another metric of impact, remained overwhelming in the preceding year and there is a great interest in TELS from contributors around the world. Submissions have a diversity of topics within the scope of TELS, however, there is a huge surge of contributions in the enabling and emerging fields related to telecommunications. During this year, it would be our priority to consider survey and review papers in the burgeoning field of telecommunications and its sub-disciplines. Contributors are welcome to contact the EiC if they would like to submit interesting survey or review papers to TELS!

To run the smooth editorial process, we have added a number of new associate editors on the editorial board and some of our members have resigned due to their other commitments and completion of tenure. We extend our sincere appreciation and gratitude to all of our editorial board members for their time, relentless efforts and services to TELS. Since the quality and timeline of reviews are very important for us, we hope that new associate editors would help in improving the quality and contents of the journal.

Besides, we cannot forget to compliment the efforts of our editorial staff especially, Ms. Priyanka Ganesh, who has recently resigned from her position in November 2017. Indeed, she had been a great source of support to the journal sine 2014. She is substituted by Ms. Kirthana Hariharan as the new journal’s editorial office assistant who is well-versed with the Editorial Manager (EM) system, and currently providing us with her best support in the editorial workflow of TELS.

We are also supported by Springer’s staff Ms. Faith Su who recently joined us as the assistant editor and helping us in maintaining the journal’s website and other related work. The guidance and support of Matthew Amboy, Editor Operations Research at Springer, is laudable and praiseworthy for the strategic management of TELS. Furthermore, Robert Darnowsky, Editor Production, has always been helpful and cooperative in managing the lineup of publication volumes and monthly issues of TELS. He is always punctual and prompt in the production of journal’s volumes and issues.

At the end, once again happy new year and seasons greetings to all directly or indirectly involved with TELS.

Muhammad Khurram Khan, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief

Telecommunication Systems (Springer)

King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

Email: mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa

Web: http://www.professorkhurram.com