Security and Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: Critical Infrastructure and Smart Applications
A Special Issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220) belonging to the section "Sensor Networks".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2027 | Viewed by 13
Editors
Interests: cybersecurity; internet of things
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly deployed in critical infrastructures, including smart energy, water networks, transport, healthcare, and industrial control systems (OT/IIoT). These networks connect resource-constrained sensors that often operate under strict limitations in computing power, memory, and energy supply. Consequently, they remain vulnerable to sophisticated cyber threats, ranging from physical node capture and jamming to data poisoning, traffic analysis, and adversarial attacks targeting AI-driven decisions.
This Special Issue aims to gather cutting-edge research and comprehensive reviews on trustworthy security and privacy solutions for WSNs and modern IIoT environments. We encourage contributions covering lightweight cryptographic protocols, AI-native and 6G-enabled security, digital twins, privacy-preserving techniques (such as federated learning), trustworthy AI frameworks, and alignment with emerging regulations and security standards (e.g., EU AI Act, IEC 62443, NIST CSF).
Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Security, privacy, and resilience of WSNs in critical infrastructure and smart applications.
- Lightweight cryptography, authentication, and key management for resource-constrained sensor networks.
- Secure routing, topology protection, and resilience against DoS, jamming, and node capture in WSNs.
- Traffic analysis, location privacy, and anonymity techniques for WSNs and IIoT.
- AI/ML-based IDS, anomaly detection, threat intelligence, honeypots, deception, attack simulation, and edge/distributed intelligence for WSN, IIoT, OT, and cyber-physical systems.
- Trustworthy AI for WSNs: robustness, explainability, uncertainty quantification, and human-in-the-loop designs.
- Adversarial machine learning, data poisoning, and defense mechanisms in sensor-driven AI systems.
- Privacy-preserving data aggregation, federated learning, and secure multi-party computation for WSNs.
- Blockchain, distributed ledger, and decentralized identity approaches, with explicit attention to energy and scalability trade-offs.
- Integration of WSNs with edge computing, LPWAN, 5G/6G, digital twins, and cyber-physical systems.
- 6G-enabled WSNs: security and privacy in AI-native, sliced, and edge-assisted sensor networks.
- Digital twins and agentic AI for monitoring and defending WSN-based critical infrastructure.
- Assurance, benchmarks, and testbeds for trustworthy AI and security in WSNs.
- Regulatory and standards alignment: EU AI Act, NIST CSF, IEC 62443, and sector-specific guidelines for WSN/IIoT security.
- Security evaluation datasets, testbeds, reproducibility, benchmarking, and real-world deployment studies.
Dr. Bahareh Pahlevanzadeh
Dr. Saeed Javanmardi
Guest Editors
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 submissions that pass pre-check are 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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors 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 2600 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
- wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
- cybersecurity and privacy
- critical infrastructure
- trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI)
- industrial internet of things (IIoT)
Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue
- Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
- Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
- Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
- External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
- Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.
Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.
