Pervasive Computing in IoT

Dear Colleagues,

In the Internet of Things era we have entered, the closed-loop “Monitoring–Decision–Execution” cycle of typical automation systems is extended, so it includes distributed developments that might scale from a smart home or greenhouse to a smart city and from autonomous driving to emergency management. In such highly distributed and scalable architectures, each of the three aforementioned processes can take place isolated from the others, situated at any physical or virtual computing system and located, ideally, at any place. Hence, communication and interoperation between the subsystems that comprise the total system, namely extreme edge, edge, fog, and cloud deployments, is of critical importance. To this end, new machine-to-machine protocols, as well as emerging serverless and decentralized architectures, enable the formation of ad-hoc user groups for personalized communication and interaction.

Context awareness is of equal importance, since it enables situation awareness, event recognition, and pervasiveness across the system. The latter can dynamically provide customized service provision to end-users via content adaptation to the user situation and needs. Toward this direction, modern sensor technology extends typical ambient sensing to social and cyber sensing triggering various interactions among connected devices or human beings. The same happens with modern human–computer interfaces that bring input and output capabilities to a plethora of everyday items, transforming them to enchanting and intelligent ones. In parallel, the crowdsensing paradigm vividly emerges on top of various networking topologies as a means for rapidly enabling social sensing. Very recently, researchers have promised the implementation of a full Internet of Senses (IoS) by 2030, where not only typical data will be transferred over the network but also triggers concerning senses like taste, smell, touch, etc.

Despite the richness of available data, however, the key problem for application designers remains the same: How to fuse and mine reliable information from data collected from largely unknown and possibly unreliable sources or how to dynamically extract user preferences, behaviors, and needs from the received events beyond the maintenance of static user profiles. Furthermore, recent advances in IoT management platforms, microcontrollers, and data science bring machine learning and computational intelligence closer to the source of data generation (end users, fog layers, edge, and extreme edge), enabling broader context awareness. However, despite the progress made to date, we are still far from providing low-power autonomous IoT devices which are able to deal with a large amount of data processing or a frequent need for communication or both.

The goal of this Special Issue is to invite high-quality, state-of-the-art research papers that deal with challenging issues in pervasive computing across the different parts of the IoT ecosystem. We solicit original papers of unpublished and completed research that are not currently under review by any other conference/magazine/journal. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Advances in sensors networking for the IoT;
• Advances in sensors technologies for the IoT;
• Advances in wireless communications for the IoT;
• Advances in networking for the IoT;
• Internet of Multimedia Things;
• Data compression for the IoT;
• Low-power and energy-efficient IoT computing;
• Cloud/fog/edge/extreme edge computing for the IoT;
• Network management for the IoT;
• Network function virtualization and software-defined networking for the IoT;
• Privacy and security issues for the IoT;
• Context and situation awareness in IoT;
• Dynamic user profilng for the IoT;
• Adaptive service provision for the IoT;
• Sensor and data fusion for the IoT;
• Pervasive and ubiquitous computing for the IoT;
• Advances in human–computer interfaces for the IoT;
• Machine learning and computational intelligence for the IoT;
• Decision support systems for the IoT;
• Data analytics for the IoT;
• Advances in physical computing;
• Critical infrastructure IoT;
• Advances in STEM education for the IoT;
• Serverless and decentralized applications for the IoT;
• Crowdsensing and social sensing for IoT applications;
• Internet of Senses.

Dr. Spyros Panagiotakis
Dr. Evangelos K. Markakis
Guest Editors

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