UAV Networking Applications in the Internet-of-Things Era

Dear Colleagues,

Research in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has grown significantly, and it has paved the way to numerous applications in both civilian (agriculture and forest monitoring, package delivery, building and structural inspections, search-and-rescue, law enforcement) and military domains (surveillance, combat, border protection), resulting in improved productivity, safety, and efficiency. The systems can offer multiple unique benefits due to their ability to carry flexible payloads in addition to allowing flexible deployment in remote and hostile regions. Today, it is also possible to operate networked multi-UAV systems to accomplish a certain mission, e.g., to extend the connectivity of ubiquitous communication networks while facilitating large-scale data sharing.

As such, the advent of UAVs has brought connectivity to a whole new level to support Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) by simultaneously connecting multiple physical objects such as sensors or machines and the Internet, allowing for access to real-time data, and cyber-physical systems. The systems can facilitate better access and collaboration with people from various backgrounds living in different geographical regions. The concepts of IoT have been adopted in various areas of modern life, starting from smart grids, healthcare, intelligent transport systems, and environment monitoring.

There are, nonetheless, myriad research challenges that deserve further attention from researchers, starting from choosing the right UAV platforms, communication networks, protocols, and IoT architecture, as well as security and privacy issues. 

In this Special Issue, however, we focus on the benefits of UAVs for supporting advanced developments of the Internet of Things (IoT) with an emphasis on (but not limited to) their intelligent applications, such as for future smart cities. As such, we would like to invite researchers working in these research areas to share their findings while fostering collaboration among interdisciplinary experts, i.e., robotics and automation, machine learning and data science, communications, and signal processing as well as cyber-security and forensics, to achieve a holistic approach to the research problems.

Dr. Fendy Santoso
Guest Editor

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