Smart Homes and IoT

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting increasing momentum, both as topic of research in academia and in the new developments in the industrial environment, finally hitting the consumer market. On the other hand, domotic appliances and applications gave been since long time a promising market which, however, did not realize yet its full potential.

Combining smart homes and IoT could finally unleash the potential of a huge market and fulfil the expectations of a large user community.

Recent developments in the wireless arena include:

• Bluetooth Low Energy version 5 with mesh capabilities
• Thread
• ZigBee
• WiFi mesh devices

As wireless communication enablers, as well as application level technologies, such as Amazon’s Alexa powered devices, along with Google Home and Apple Homekit ecosystems, started a new wave of interest in IoT and smart homes. The interaction then between IoT and such systems can pave the way to a true “smart home”; open, interoperable and affordable.

Smart cities are increasingly becoming an interdisciplinary hot topic, involving disciplines ranging from architecture and urban planning to societal studies. This Special Issue is focused on a specific technical enabler for the Smart Cities: Connectivity.

Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to publish high-quality research, both from academic and industrial stakeholders, and serves as an outlet for disseminating innovative solutions towards meeting the expectations for the combination of IoT and smart homes, improving the aforementioned solutions, including new modulation and coding schemes, new network architectures (including gateways and IP interoperability) and new combinations of existing solutions. Original, high quality contributions that have not yet been published, submitted, or are not currently under review by other journals or peer-reviewed conferences are sought.

Dr. Lorenzo Vangelista
Guest Editor

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