Novel Networking Technologies for Pervasive Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The large popularity of pervasive systems and the advent of novel visions of smart cities, industry 4.0, or personalized healthcare demand that a great number of user devices and a large volume of data are managed and supported. Moreover, pervasive systems are progressively being used in critical applications, such as in healthcare, manufacturing, critical infrastructure monitoring, and control, so that resiliency, dependability, and security must be provided, so as to cope with faults and attacks in order to retain a suitable level of quality and service. In this context, the novel networking technologies put in place by 5G, and the upcoming next generations for cellular systems, the hierarchical architectures of edge/fog computing mediating between the sensing substrate, and the cloud platforms, as well as the innovative ICT concepts of blockchain and distributed ledger, are paving the way for novel platforms to be able to cope with the current challenges and issues of pervasive systems. These days, such novel platforms are under investigation by the academic community, but are also deployed in the first prototypes by key players in the industrial domains, where pervasiveness of ICT and data management is of pivotal importance.

The progressive success in and recent adoption of the concrete deployments of software defined networks, virtualized network functions, and cloud/centralized radio access network are making the concrete implementation of the edge/fog computing vision possible, as well as the application of many concepts of 5G and beyond. The softwarization of networking is making it possible to bring together network innovative solutions for security and resiliency, while edge/fog computing is promising for dealing with the scalability needs of the current and future pervasive systems. Therefore, these technologies have been receiving a great deal of attention from researchers and industrial practitioners in recent years, as they are key enablers for pervasive systems in order to be able to be successfully applied where intelligence needs to be coupled with sensing and monitoring, such as in the mentioned smart city, smart factory, and so on. This is especially true within the context of the Internet of things (IoT), which is a particular kind of pervasive system that is particularly popular nowadays. Many efforts are being made in order to apply 5G and edge/fog computing to IoT, especially within the industrial context, as well as blockchain and other new ICT concepts.

This Special Issue aims to present a collection of exciting papers, reporting on the most recent advances in pervasive systems leveraging on the novel networking technologies of 5G and beyond, as well as new ICT concepts such as blockchain, distributed ledger, software defined networks, and edge/fog computing. Example topics of interest are the applications of DSP in areas such as the ones in the following list.

• Fog/edge computing architectures for pervasive systems
• Task and data allocation in novel pervasive systems
• 5G technologies and beyond enabling novel pervasive systems
• Blockchain platforms in the Internet of things
• Disaster resilient communications in the Internet of things
• Secure communications in the novel pervasive systems
• Novel D2D communication technologies and support

Dr. Christian Esposito
Dr. Chang Choi
Prof. Dr. Yupeng Wang
Dr. Gianluca Rizzo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 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.

• pervasive systems
• Fog/edge computing
• 5G technologies
• D2D communication
• Blockchain
• Internet of things