A primary aim of wireless ad-hoc networks is to deliver data in areas where there is no pre-defined infrastructure. In these networks, the users, but also the network entities can be potentially mobile. Wireless ad-hoc networks have recently witnessed their fastest growth period ever in history. Real wireless ad-hoc networks are now implemented, deployed and tested, and this trend is likely to increase in the future. However, as such networks are increasingly complex, performance modeling and evaluation play a crucial part in their design process to ensure their successful deployment and exploitation in practice.
The main goals of a smart-city are to improve sustainability and livability, to ease city government and organization, and to increase services to the citizens. The primary role of ICT in enabling this vision is to keep the decision makers, the stake holders and the citizen constantly updated with fresh information collected around the city. To accomplish this task, next generation cities, will be populated with billions of heterogeneous devices ranging from tiny communicating objects (e.g., actuators, sensors, tags) able to interact with the surrounding environment and remote systems, to high-end nodes (e.g., data centers, workstations) capable of complex operations and to process a huge amount of information.
The smart grid will be adopting several communication technologies to fulfill the wide range of functionalities expected from the modern electricity grid. The complex communication needs of the smart grid call for innovative approaches to communicate various data over a range of environments, spanning from individual homes and neighborhoods to wide area networks covering electrical interconnections. In this context, cognitive radio (CR) based smart grid systems emerge as a promising candidate. Inclusion of cognitive radio based communications in the smart grid may help in overcoming radio spectrum shortages by flexibly using licensed and unlicensed frequency spectrum bands for future smart grid applications. Cognitive radio based smart grid systems may also reduce the power consumption and increase the interoperability among heterogeneous communication networks. In this special issue, we are seeking new and unpublished work in the domain of Cognitive Radio based Smart Grid systems. More specifically, this special issue will focus on recent developments in Cognitive Radio based communication techniques with applications to the Smart Grid.
Vehicular networking and communication systems represent an area of significant importance in our increasingly connected and mobile world. Effective vehicular connectivity techniques can significantly enhance efficiency of travel, reduce traffic incidents and improve safety, mitigate the impact of congestion, and overall provide a more comfortable experience. This special issue covers contributions towards this goal focusing on recent developments and challenges in vehicular networking technologies, and their applications.
Big data is the current big thing in computing after cloud computing and it is in par with software defined network (SDN) in communications and networks field. It is evident that big data is making big impact to diverse walks of our everyday life, ranging from increasing understanding of digital system or human/social behaviours/processes to promoting economic growth and eventually to improving human being’s health and quality of life.
This special issue aims to bring together state-of-the-art contributions on Internet of Things Security and Privacy: design methods of secure IoT applications and architectures, security attacks detection, prevention and counter measures. Original, unpublished contributions are solicited in all aspects of this discipline.
Internet is extending beyond its fixed network infrastructure boundaries by gradually incorporating a wide range of challenging networks and autonomous devices, serving non-traditional user communities, such as space missions, disaster areas, and economically challenged populations.
The energy efficiency of data centers has been in the focus of research for several years. Technologies, such as the virtualization of services and infrastructures, are broadly available in data centers, today. Not only IT infrastructures (e.g., servers, storage, and network) have been considered for energy management, but also the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) environment. Such achievements have impact on the design of new energy-aware data center technologies and topologies.
With the recent initiatives to upgrade the existing power grid to a Smart Grid, there has been a significant interest in the design and development of an efficient communication infrastructure for connecting different components of the Smart Grid. In addition to currently used underlying networks and protocols, new wired/wireless networks and protocols are planned to be deployed for different components/applications of the Smart Grid. Based on the data requirements of the applications, new challenges have arisen at the network layer of the protocol stack with respect to routing and data forwarding.