The 9th 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Network, and Satellite (COMNETSAT 2020) was held successfully on December 17–18, 2020 through the support of 472 TPC members. The conference had 133 total reviewed papers from 367 authors from 18 countries with 81 accepted papers. Moreover, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year COMNETSAT 2020 was held as a synchronous video conference.

The first COMNETSAT was held in 2012 in Bali, Indonesia; every year after that it was held in different cities. All conference proceedings from COMNETSAT can be accessed on IEEE Xplore at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1802000/all-proceedings. In 2020, COMNETSAT was originally planned in Batam, Indonesia and organized by the Batam Institute of Technology.

If you have take vacation to Batam, it doesn’t feel complete if you don’t stop by the Barelang Bridge, which is Batam’s icon. Barelang Bridge itself stands for Batam, Rempang, and Galang. This bridge connects many islands, such as Batam Island, Tonton Island, Nipah Island, Rempang Island, Galang Island, and Galang Baru Island. The hot afternoon and evening sun makes a glimpse of this bridge similar to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

However, the pandemic conditions forced the meeting to not be held in Batam, and in the end COMNETSAT 2020 had to be carried out using synchronous video conferencing. Similar to previous COMNETSAT, this year the conference also had four solid conference tracks as follows: Communications track, Network track, Satellite track, and Broadband and Photonics track, with the Communications track being the most demanding track. Meanwhile the most demanding topics in the conference were Radio Communications and Internet of Things. Many important updates were delivered at COMNETSAT 2020 during 11 technical sessions and two keynote sessions.

Some of the important updates in the keynote sessions were delivered by Dr. Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, USA; Dr. Yang Liu from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China; and Dr. Zhi Liu from The University of Electro-Communications, Japan. Dr. Amiri presented Federated Edge Learning: Advances and Challenges, pointing out some challenges, such as bandwidth-limited device-to-PS links, mobile devices with no CSI, device scheduling, noisy PS-to-device links, and convergence guarantees. Dr. Yang Liu presented Endogenously Secure Radio Access Networks, pointing out authentication and authorization for wireless access network endogenous security toward deployment simplicity, design miniaturization technical refinement, and functional integration. Dr. Zhi Liu presented updates on advanced research on VR video and Point Cloud Video Streaming.

In the closing session, COMNETSAT 2020 presented four best papers as follows:

“Supervised Learning for Enhanced Early HARQ Feedback Prediction in URLLC” by Saleh AlMarshed, Dionysia Triantafyllopoulou and Klaus Moessner from the University of Surrey, U.K. in the Communications track.

“Performance Analysis and Optimization of Novel Hybrid Communication Mode for Vehicular Network” by Xueying Jiang, Wei He, and Tao Han from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in the Network track.

“Energy Efficiency and Delay Trade-off over Multi-beam Satellite Downlinks” by Kaiwei Wang and Shuo Wang from China Electronics Technology Group Corporation in the Satellite track.

“Design and Analysis of Bandpass Filter Using SIW Techniques and CPW Feed” by Rashmita Mishra from B.P. Poddar Institute of Management and Technology, Kolkata, India, and Kailash Chandra Rout from Capital Engineering College, Bhubaneswar, India in the Broadband and Photonics track.

Finally, we all don’t know whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be overcome quickly or not, but for sure, we all still have to conduct engineering and research with passion and we look forward to your participation in COMNETSAT 2021.