Collaborative Intelligence for Networks and Communications in the 6G Era

Dear Colleagues,

The sixth generation (6G) communication announces the best performance ever, not only regarding throughput and latency, but also in terms of both the number of connected objets and active connections. In the previous generation communication systems, both the limited number of connected devices and the few variety in the services favored applications on the client-server model, through a pre-deployed communication infrastructure. In the 6G era, the Internet of everything announces a wide range of applications in various fields such as smart city, Industry 4.0 manufactures, intelligent transportation, and autonomous robots and vehicles. Moreover, these applications will often operate while relying on direct cooperation and communications between the devices than on centralized servers through a telecommunication infrastructure. Therefore, addressing the following issues will be mandatory in order to design and evaluate the most suitable network and communication organizations for achieving the best performance for the applications envisaged in the 6G era :

• Combinatorial optimization and artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches should be investigated in order to design and evaluate innovative routing protocols that achieve the best integration of device-to-device and device-to-infrastructure communications in order to offer the best performance to the applications, while keeping the most performing network organization when the communication infrastructure is unavailable or overloaded.
• New design and evaluation approaches should be investigated for developing applications that can operate through centralized servers in an infrastructure-based communication context, and adapt themselves in order to continue through devices intelligent collaboration and device-to-device communications when the communication infrastructure is unavailable.

This special issue focuses on the technical challenges for enabling collaborative intelligence in vehicular networks, IoT and Industrial Internet of Things in the 6G era. Prospective authors are invited to submit original manuscripts that advance the state of the art on topics including, but not limited to:

• Collaborative intelligence for routing protocols in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for  human-machine cooperation in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for device localization enhancement in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for collective sensing and perception in the 6G era    
• Collaborative intelligence for the resilience of communications in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for low-latency communications in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for secure communications in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for identification, privacy and audit of communications in the 6G era
• Collaborative intelligence for cooperation between infrastructure-based and ad hoc  communications in the 6G era
• Collaborative modeling and simulation of networks and communications in the 6G era

Prof. Dr. Patrick Sondi
Prof. Dr. Praveen Kumar Malik
Dr. Martine Wahl
Dr. J. Antonio Garcia-Macias
Dr. Ion Turcanu
Guest Editors

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