Dear Colleagues,

Today, over half the world's population lives in cities, and this percentage is set to increase to three quarters in 2050 according to the UN.  Built environments contribute to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, 75% of the world's primary energy consumption and the waste of 250–500 million cubic meters of drinking water. Thus, urbanization makes cities a focus for environmental policy as it represents the largest of any environmental policy challenge.  Creating efficient smart cities and buildings through automation is therefore key to cope with the increased urban growth.

Today’s availability of low-cost embedded sensors and actuators offers an unprecedented opportunity to increase buildings’ operational efficiency through automation while reducing their running costs. Smart heterogeneous devices that monitor the utilization and energy consumption of buildings, e.g., motion, noise, temperature, moisture, humidity, gas and air quality sensors, smart meters, amongst others, can be integrated with citywide traffic systems, water recycling, power distribution, remote surveillance, waste disposal and other data infrastructures. These Internet of Things (IoT) devices need to communicate and coordinate with each other for smart buildings to operate autonomously and efficiently. Connectivity is often delivered by a combination of wired and wireless networks. This necessitates developing open and non-proprietary protocol standards.

Cities will be smart by interconnecting smart buildings, factories, vehicles, power grids and other data infrastructures.  We are currently at the start of this revolution, which is rapidly gaining momentum. The aim of this Special Issue is to publish cutting-edge research focused on addressing the various communication, sensing and actuation technical open challenges. It particularly focuses on future wireless communication, sensor and actuator technologies in the context of smart and sustainable cities. It also solicits contributions on wireless communications, signal processing and intelligent sensing and actuation. Authors of selected outstanding papers in the International Conference of Future Networks and Distributed Systems will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for consideration in this Special Issue.

Topics of interest include the following:

• Wireless communications systems and networks for IoT
• Sensors and actuators for smart cities and automation
• Distributed resource allocation
• Human to machine communications
• Architecture for sustainability and automation in urban environments
• Artificial intelligence and data analytics for sensing and actuation
• Security and safety in IoT-enabled automation
• Digital twins, simulation and modeling for smart cities and IoT
• Smart grids
• Vehicular communication networks
• Industry 4.0 and IoT applications to automation in smart cities
• IoT and Blockchain for sustainable automation

Prof. Dr. George Karagiannidis
Prof. Dr. Weihua Zhuang
Prof. Dr. Mohammad Hammoudeh
Guest Editors

Short Biography

George K. Karagiannidis is currently a Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and Head of the Wireless Communications & Information Processing (WCIP) Group. His research interests are in the broad area of digital communications systems and signal processing, with emphasis on wireless communications, optical wireless communications, wireless power transfer and applications and communications and signal processing for biomedical engineering. Dr. Karagiannidis was the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters, and currently he serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Open Journal of Communications Society. Dr. Karagiannidis is an IEEE Fellow and one of the most highly cited authors across all areas of electrical engineering, recognized by Clarivate Analytics as Web-of-Science Highly Cited Researcher in the six consecutive years 2015–2020.

Weihua Zhuang has been with the University of Waterloo, Canada, since 1993, where she is a Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Wireless Communication Networks. Dr. Zhuang was a recipient of the 2021 Women's Distinguished Career Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, the 2021 R.A. Fessenden Award from IEEE Canada, and the 2017 Technical Recognition Award in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks from the IEEE Communications Society. She was the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology from 2007 to 2013, Technical Program Chair/Co-Chair of IEEE VTC 2017/2016 Fall, and Technical Program Symposia Chair of IEEE Globecom 2011. She is an elected member of the Board of Governors and Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. Dr. Zhuang is a Fellow of the IEEE, Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering, and Engineering Institute of Canada.

Mohammad Hammoudeh is a Professor (Chair) of Cyber Security in the Department of Computing and Mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of ACM’s journal on Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research & Practice. Mohammad heads the CfACS Internet of Things Lab he founded in 2016. He established the lab as a leading research hub with a broad portfolio of successful, industry-sponsored projects. Mohammad has a global collaborative research network spanning the academic community, industry, policy makers and wider technology stakeholders in the field of cybersecurity, the Internet of Things and complex highly decentralized systems. Throughout his 15-year research career, Mohammad has developed significant insight and expertise in a number of computer science disciplines, such as Artificial Intelligence, adjacent to his area of specialism—decentralized systems.

Manuscript Submission Information

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• smart buildings
• sustainable cities
• future networks
• wireless communications
• digital twins
• artificial intelligence
• internet of things
• cyber–physical systems
• industry 4.0
• smart energy