Dear Colleagues,

The forthcoming 6th generation of communication networks (6G) will attempt to rewrite the communication networks’ perspective, focusing on a radical revolution in the way entities and technologies are conceived, integrated, and used. This will lead to innovative approaches with the aim of providing new directions to deal with future network challenges posed by the upcoming 6G. The analysis and modeling of networks as well as dynamical and temporal systems has attracted considerable multidisciplinary interest in research, giving birth to the interdisciplinary field of network science. Network science is the study of systems with many interdependent components, which may interact in several ways. Due to their size and the intrinsic complexity, such systems are defined as complex systems. Network science is providing new radical ways of understanding many different dynamical and temporal mechanisms and processes from the physical, social, engineering information, and biological sciences. Complex systems are characterized by emergent behaviors, largely determined by the nontrivial networks of interactions among their constituents. At a mesoscale level, recurrent patterns of interactions (motifs) determine the overall structure and organization of the system and may help to identify possible anomalies. This motivates the need of analytical methods to design a self-organized, resilient and cognitive network, suitable for many application fields (e.g., digital health or smart cities living scenarios).

In this context, random models are powerful tools to design networks with desired properties. 6G networks are intrinsically suitable to be modelled as multidimensional relational systems of different sub-networks, represented by various graphs that embed interacting elements in different ways. The multiplex or multilayer dimension offers a key change in structural perspective to investigate the emergence of complex network properties. The social aspects include human beings and devices as heterogeneous and interacting elements of a complex socio-technical ecosystem whose collective and evolutionary behavior plays a pivotal role for the design, forecasting, and monitoring of the communication network functions.

This Special Issue focuses on analytical methodologies, measures, and algorithms linked to the complex systems approach to facing challenges in 6G development. We are also interested in case studies based on different application fields, from health to smart cities. Through this Special Issue, we hope to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in complex systems and networking from both academia and industry to present their novel and unpublished works in the domains explained above toward meeting the new challenging demands of 6G.

Dr. Marialisa Scatà
Dr. Salvatore Alaimo
Dr. Giovanni Micale
Guest Editors

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• complex systems and networks
• multilayer networks
• multiplex networks
• temporal networks
• motifs
• 6G communication networks
• mobile communication networks
• computational methods
• mathematical physics
• nonlinear problems
• dynamical systems
• social networks
• evolutionary game theory