Dear Colleagues,

There is a strong trend for ubiquitous computing devices and objects that proliferate throughout our environment, homes, streets, buildings and even in our bodies. These tiny sensor/actuator systems pave the way for the realm of the (Internet of things) IoT and offer an unprecedented capability to sense and actuate in the physical world. In this context, we can observe important advances being introduced to the communication and computing infrastructure that bring new and specific challenges.

The last decade has seen significant progress towards connecting intelligent embedded devices to the Cloud through the Internet. While the Cloud infrastructure allows for resource-constrained devices to benefit from their seemingly infinite resources, there are significant challenges to support applications that generate very large amounts of data, may experience discontinuous Internet connectivity, or require a tight interconnection with the physical world, such as the more traditional Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)—smart buildings, smart vehicles, smart industrial and mobile robots, industrial manufacturing—but also emerging applications such as interactive mixed reality systems and advanced cooperative autonomous robotic systems.

In fact, the conceptualization of robots—industrial robots and also ground and/or aerial mobile robots—as CPS has enabled their cooperation with and integration within IoT technologies, coining terms such as "Ubiquitous robotics" or "Cloud robotics", the implementation of which has enabled unprecedented perception and/or actuation capabilities and advantages in a wide range of industrial and service robotic applications.

Researchers and practitioners have been increasingly interested in bringing significant computing and storage closer to the local ("edge") devices such as gateways, PCs, mobile phones, sensors and actuators—a paradigm called "Edge Computing". At the level of wireless communication technologies to support CPS applications, we also see important advances in future ultra-low latency wireless first-hop and other advanced (Quality of Service) QoS features proposed for 5G networks. Finally, the trend to virtualize network resources and functionality through Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) continues to advance, and can be an important enabler to lower the complexity and technical difficulties involved in designing and deploying future CPS systems.

These are examples of advances that we need to pull together in order to address fundamental challenges, technologies and emerging directions in the design and implementation of future CPS.

In this Special Issue, we are particularly interested in works that exploit these recent trends for promoting the capabilities of future CPS-inspired applications, including Internet of Things, sensor networks, mobile devices, autonomous systems, or vehicular networks.

This special issue welcomes Surveys and Position papers. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Fundamental aspects and design principles tackling opposing factors (mobility, latency, capability and privacy), common in emerging CPS;
• Novel applications and requirements in CPS-inspired applications (e.g., interactive mixed reality, advanced ubiquitous robotic systems, cloud robotic systems);
• Novel architectures for CPS, embracing recent trends (e.g., considering QoS from the network edge to the Cloud, locality to data sources and network infrastructure virtualization);
• Resource allocation and management of future CPS;
• Techniques, algorithms and methods of processing data;
• New communication and networking protocols for future CPS;
• Programming models and toolkits for supporting the development and test of future CPS;
• Trust, privacy and security aspects in future CPS;
• Simulation, testbeds and performance evaluation for CPS;
• Emerging trends in Industrial CPS.

Dr. Nuno Pereira
Prof. Dr. Mário Alves
Prof. Dr. J.R. Martínez de Dios
Guest Editors

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