Future Communication Networks and Systems for Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

We are living at a time of rapid global urbanization and development. People are relocating to cities at alarming rates. This is indeed evident in populous nations such as China and India, which account for nearly 40% of the world's population. Almost 250 million rural residents are anticipated to move to metropolitan regions in China alone over the next ten to fifteen years. In a few decades, this will require building new infrastructure to accommodate nearly the equivalent of 75% of the country's current population.

Building and creating smart homes and cities has benefited greatly from a number of major enabling technologies, many of which are still in use today. The Internet, wireless networks and systems like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, Smart Phones with LTE, 3G, 4G, and 5G cell systems, body area sensor networks, smart grids and renewable energy, optical fiber systems and high-speed networks, Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs), global positioning systems (GPSs), geographical information systems (GISs), wireless navigation systems, and global positioning systems are (ITSs). Nevertheless, the increased reliance or city residents in smart ICT applications, together with the above-mentioned rapid urbanization trend, will bring a tremendous increase in the amount of traffic that will be produced in the city of the future, thus straining the limits of current data communication networks.

In this Special Issue, articles addressing new challenges and solutions for the network infrastructure of smart cities of the future are invited. Authors are encouraged to submit articles mainly describing original research, presenting results that advance the state of the art and fuel more efforts in the future. Review articles are also welcome. Representative topics that this SI will consider include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Smart city communications infrastructure;
• Ubiquitous sensing and actuation;
• IoT architectures, protocols, and algorithms in smart cities;
• Reliability, security, safety, privacy and trust issues;
• Intelligent transportation systems and vehicular networks;
• Smart energy grid;
• Smart homes for elderly citizens;
• Crowdsensing and crowdsourcing.

Prof. Dr. Petros Nicopolitidis
Guest Editor

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