Dear Colleagues,

By leveraging the global interconnection of billions of tiny smart objects, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is the main enabler of smart environments, ranging from smart cities, to building automation, smart transportation, smart grids and healthcare. However, despite the research advancements in recent years, many open issues still prevent the full realization of such visions.
Today’s communication systems hardly suit the connection of a huge number of (usually battery-powered) IoT devices, including low-power sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets and robots. Massively distributed into the environment, those devices may generate huge amounts of data, offer computational resources, and cooperate to perform some tasks locally, as well as to delegate their execution to more powerful nodes. In addition to the traditional pull-based data delivery, push-based and publish/subscribe traffic patterns must be supported. Such a complex ecosystem requires proper scalable management platforms and protocols able to dynamically discover and integrate the new IoT devices that might be introduced in the smart environment.
Many research activities are being conducted to address these issues.
In the context of the 5G standardization, massive machine type communications is considered one of the driving use cases where intelligent machines, without or with a low degree of intervention by humans, autonomously generate, process and exchange data.
Middleware architectures, together with the cloud and the edge computing paradigms, are proposed to deal with device heterogeneity, and to manage the huge amount of data generated by IoT sources. In addition to designs based on the IP protocol, such as CoAP/6LoWPAN, novel future internet networking paradigms, such as information-centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN), also play a key role in the deployment of IoT smart environments.

This Special Issue aims to present a collection of innovative papers reporting the most recent advancements in the fields of smart architecture, protocols and practical implementations enabling IoT for smart environments. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to the following:

Models of network component interactions on smart environments;
Distributed sensing and control in smart environments;
Mobile-aware cloud computing models, infrastructures, and approaches for smart environments;
Mobile edge computing for smart environments;
Crowdsourcing in smart environments;
IoT architecture and middleware;
Novel communication protocols for M2M/MTC communication;
Novel networking paradigms (e.g., ICN, SDN) for IoT;
Energy efficient solutions for IoT;
Device-2-device communications (D2D);
Reliability, security, privacy and trust in smart environment ecosystems;
Business models to promote user collaboration and resource sharing in smart environments;
Testbeds demonstrating the feasibility of smart environments;
Applications, business, standards, and social issues.

Dr. Giuseppe Ruggeri
Dr. Valeria Loscrì
Dr. Marica Amadeo
Dr. Carlos Tavares Calafate
Guest Editors

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Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 July 2019