Convergence of IoT and Edge Computing: Advances in Security and Performance Optimization

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) systems and the growing adoption of edge computing architectures have reshaped the landscape of distributed intelligence, real time analytics, and cyber physical applications. As IoT deployments increasingly depend on edge resources to meet stringent latency, privacy, and bandwidth requirements, new challenges continue to emerge at the intersection of security, performance, and scalability. This Special Issue calls for cutting edge contributions that advance both theoretical foundations and practical implementations of secure, high performance, and resilient IoT-edge ecosystems.

While individual aspects of IoT security, edge computation, and distributed optimization have each received considerable scholarly attention, comprehensive studies that examine their convergence remain limited. This Special Issue seeks to bridge existing gaps by offering a unified venue for research that integrates the security and performance dimensions of IoT-edge systems. It aims to promote cross-disciplinary innovation across networking, cybersecurity, embedded systems, optimization, and artificial intelligence; showcase deployable and scalable solutions for real-world environments; and highlight emerging trends shaping the next generation of intelligent and secure edge-driven IoT infrastructures. Meanwhile, the adoption of large language models (LLMs) at the edge introduces new opportunities for autonomy and adaptivity, as well as additional considerations for security, privacy, and reliability.

We invite original theoretical, methodological, and applied contributions that explore the convergence of IoT and edge computing, with emphasis on novel security mechanisms, optimization strategies, architectural innovations, and application driven breakthroughs. As AI models increasingly operate at the network edge, new challenges arise in securing deployment, ensuring reliable inference, and managing resources effectively to preserve system integrity, privacy, resilience, and trustworthiness. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Security in IoT-edge environments: Zero-trust architectures, intrusion detection, secure offloading mechanisms, lightweight cryptography, privacy-preserving analytics, trust management, attack mitigation strategies, and real-world security studies.
• Performance optimization and benchmarking: Resource allocation, task scheduling, latency reduction, real-time inference, dynamic workload balancing, energy-aware optimization, and performance evaluation methodologies for heterogeneous IoT-edge-cloud systems.
• Intelligent, adaptive, and resilient edge architectures: AI-driven orchestration, federated and distribute learning across IoT-edge-cloud layers, context-aware optimization, autonomic computing approaches, and architecture design for resilient, fault-tolerant edge intelligence.
• Scalability, interoperability, and systems integration: Protocol enhancements, cross-layer optimization, interoperable frameworks for large-scale IoT deployments, middleware and toolkit enabling IoT-edge convergence, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) integration models.
• Emerging technologies and paradigms: Blockchain-enabled edge systems, digital twins, 6G-enabled edge computing, distributed analytics, secure data and device management in resource-constrained environments.
• AI and foundation-model integration at the edge: Security threats and attack vectors, efficient on-device deployment and inference, secure edge-cloud integration of foundation models, AI/LLM-assisted edge intelligence, and trustworthy, explainable, and securely managed AI at the edge.
• Applications and real-world use cases: Deployments and case studies in smart cities, healthcare, industrial IoT, autonomous and intelligent transportation systems, environmental monitoring, and next-generation communication networks.

We look forward to receiving your valuable contributions to this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Chao Chen
Dr. Ning Yang
Dr. Antian Wang
Guest Editors

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