Special Issue "Green IoT for Sustainable Smart Cities"

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2022.

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Mohammed H. Alsharif
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Korea
Interests: wireless communications; network information theory; Internet of Things; green communication; sustainable cellular networks
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As concerns about energy security and greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past few decades, academia and industry have both devoted significant efforts in developing new technologies and strategies for green communication and information networks, which are deeply integrated into peoples’ lives. The demands for greening communications and networking cover a wide range of sections, including 5G/beyond 5G mobile cellular systems, next generation WiFi systems, vehicle‐to‐grid networks, IoT systems, and smart grid communication systems. Meanwhile, there have been a variety of critical performance metrics raised by the green technologies and strategies, including carbon‐based energy consumption, energy efficiency, integration of renewable energy, reliability, quality of service, and economics issues involved in green‐oriented designs. Recently, with much effort in this area, several green communication approaches are entering into a more mature phase, with exciting applications in various networks. However, it is essential to investigate the trade-off between energy efficiency for green communications and the network requirements concerning the energy consumption, throughput, and response time under different wireless network conditions.

The Internet-of-Things is a key enabler of many modernized applications, facilitated by the widespread availability of commodity low-power sensors, partially autonomous actuators and robots, smartphones, tablets, and their wireless connectivity solutions. However, complicated operations such as device interconnection, data transmission, and service optimization will consume substantial energy in contrast with the limited energy storage of IoT devices. To improve architectural sustainability and ultimately reduce systemic cost, the energy efficient design of green IoT (GIoT) has become more prominent. With the continuous penetration of advanced information and communications (ICT) technologies, our smart world is being surrounded by green IoT data that craves energy-efficient caching, computing, wireless networking, and securing. Some emerging techniques (e.g., edge computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence) are thought to have promise, with novel approaches for overcoming the sustainability limitations of current IoT systems. However, fully utilizing these techniques from communication, data processing, computing, etc., to improve the energy efficiency of IoT still faces many fundamental challenges. The rapid increase in sensor nodes results in increased power consumption. Therefore, the reduction of environmental impact in green media networks is a crucial challenge for academic and industrial researchers. One of the challenges for IoT-based applications is to improve their power efficiency, energy optimization, resource management, and network longevity through miniaturization, addressing limited battery life, and enabling the dynamic motion of sensor nodes in industrial applications. Therefore, for efficient power management and necessary optimization for IoT applications, artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning (DL), and other neural network (NN)-based approaches are arising as a solution for green communication.

Smart cities are becoming a reality due to the enormous research into the technology enabling the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE), which has a multitude of applications built around various types of sensors. The wide adoption of networked, pervasive, and green computing systems has given rise to the term “smart cities” which, nowadays, implies the property of sustainable city growth. To manage the increased population of cities, there is a need to have more sustainable, environmental, and economically friendly smarter cities and technologies. ICT-driven innovations for the smart urban environment lie at the heart of the transformation of cities into more sustainable and reliable environments. Sustainable development based on smart technologies will make cities flexible, adaptable, mitigate adverse impacts, and stimulate beneficial socioeconomic and environmental changes. In the smart city context, IoE can provide an overlay solution for people, devices, and data to become digitally unified. IoE is an emerging concept that comes into practice through the employment of ICT hardware and intelligence in underlying physical infrastructure. Recently, a number of smart devices have appeared on a large scale as a component of digitally enhanced services, such as those associated with healthcare assistance, security and safety, real-time traffic monitoring, and managing the environment. Furthermore, the growing footprint of ultra-high-speed broadband networks, pervasive wireless networks, cloud computing, crowd sensing, and software-defined infrastructure connect smart/mobile devices to generate relevant city data on a massive scale. These advances enable transformative applications and services that will enhance the quality of peoples’ lives while addressing important national priorities such as real-time tracking, security, authenticity, and availability of classified information to decision makers. Similarly, to make a smart city, a strong communications infrastructure is required for connecting smart objects, people, and sensors. 

The advent of the beyond fifth generation (B5G) high-speed communication networks and Internet of Things (IoTs) is expected not only to make it necessary to rapidly increase the number of communication nodes and generate large amounts of data but also to change the nature of the network into a more dynamic environment. With this Special Issue, we aim to bring together researchers, academics, and individuals working on selected areas of smart cities along with new emerging technologies and share their new ideas, latest findings, and results. We hope that this Special Issue highlights the opportunities, challenges, and applications of B5G-GIoT in everyday life. Both original research and review articles are welcomed. Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Energy efficiency for wireless communication
  • IoT architectures, protocols, and algorithms in smart cities
  • Enabling technologies for IoT–cloud integration in smart cities
  • Scalable network infrastructures for smart cities
  • 6G/5G/LTE/WiFi-enabled mobile edge computing for scalable IoT
  • QoE and QoS provisioning in scalable smart city applications and green communication networks for the IoT ecosystem
  • Reliability, security, safety, privacy, and trust issues
  • Scalable smart city applications for sustainable eco-cities
  • Intelligent transportation systems and vehicular networks
  • Green communication network designs and implementations for IoT ecosystems
  • Smart energy harvesting/charging and power management techniques 
  • Resource optimization in IoT applications
  • Smart infrastructure including smart transport, smart grids, and green communications for smart cities.
  • Innovative green communications technologies and IoT protocols for smart cities
  • Wireless networking for crowd-sensing applications in smart cities
  • Wireless networks for smart city surveillance and management
  • Experimental results, prototypes, and testbeds for smart cities
  • Sensor deployment, placement, control, and management issues
  • Mobility management in 5G and beyond for GIoT applications
  • Hardware development and research challenges for implementing 5G GIoT
  • Leveraging recent advances in computing to design GIoT and smart cities
  • Experimental network measurement and characterization of smart city data traffic
  • Interoperability between heterogeneous networks of smart cities

We hope this Special Issue will achieve a precise, concrete, and concise conclusion that contributes significantly to opening new horizons for future research directions.

Dr. Mohammed Alsharif
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • 5G/6G wireless networks
  • green communications
  • energy-efficient wireless transmission techniques
  • wireless power transfer
  • wireless energy harvesting
  • smart cities
  • IoT

Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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