Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by heterogeneous technologies, devices, and platforms, where they work together towards providing sensing, collecting, acting, processing, managing and analysing data. The emergence of the IoT concept has led to the pervasive interconnection of people, services, and devices. However, new systems in the IoT domain that employ smart solutions having embedded intelligence, connectivity and processing capabilities for edge devices rely on real-time processing at the edge of the IoT network—near the end user. Current, traditional cloud computing and IoT solutions are not able to support real-time applications, since they are designed to offer non-real-time services, e.g., stress detection in IoT smart farming applications, while they are offered at a high cost. The computation remains at the cloud, i.e., at the provider data center, while heavy analytics, visualisations, and user-aware services need long times; they are expensive, and they pose privacy issues since personal information is stored and processed in the backbone centralised servers. Next-generation IoT (NG-IoT) systems and solutions require low latency and ultra-fast analytics, given that they bring advanced smart technologies and applications with embedded intelligence, connectivity, and processing capabilities. The implementation of a reliable connectivity between devices, sensors and computing platforms is of fundamental importance towards achieving the goals of NG-IoT applications.

This Special Issue will cover a wide range of research challenges and trends related to NG-IoT architectures, requirements and applications. Researchers are invited to submit novel contributions in, but not limited to, the following topics:

• NG-IoT reference architectural models;
• NG-IoT testbeds, paradigms, and applications;
• Fifth generation (5G) technologies and NG-IoT;
• Software-defined networking (SDN) developments and applications in NG-IoT;
• Network function virtualisation (NFV) orchestration in NG-IoT;
• Artificial intelligence (AI) on the edge;
• Digital twins and tactile IoT;
• NG-IoT privacy and security frameworks;
• Traffic engineering, quality-of-service (QoS), and quality-of-experience (QoE) optimisation in NG-IoT;
• Blockchain applications for NG-IoT;
• Energy-efficiency applications in NG-IoT;
• NG-IoT applications in healthcare and medicine applications;
• NG-IoT applications in industrial applications;
• NG-IoT applications for precision agriculture, food safety and quality.

Dr. Panagiotis Sarigiannidis
Dr. Thomas Lagkas
Prof. Dr. Vasileios Argyriou
Prof. Dr. Antonio Skarmeta
Guest Editors

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