The thirteen papers in this special section focus on the topic of wireless Big Data applications. Powered by advanced analytics methods, big data has emerged as a promising paradigm to handle voluminous and complex data. Recently, to cope with the emerging fifth generation (5G) and Internet of Things (IoT), wireless big data affords us an unprecedented opportunity to obtain an in-depth understanding of wireless things and facilitate data-driven approaches for network optimization and operation. The papers in this section aim to tackle the challenges and consolidate timely theory and applications of wireless big data.