Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) has completely revolutionized the way devices operate. Instead of humans controlling or monitoring them manually, IoT has now made it possible for machines and devices to act autonomously based on certain parameters. From smart household appliances to massive industrial machines, artificial intelligence and machine intelligence have made it possible for devices to communicate among themselves and with their surroundings. All these efforts boil down to one common use case; that is, to make life easier for humans by letting machines do repetitive and dangerous tasks. This has led to great advances and opportunities in various fields, the most common and interesting of which is smart urban management using IoT.

The applications of smart urban environments using IoT can be broadly classified into those in the home, mobiles, utilities, and enterprises based on coverage, end-user involvement, scalability, heterogeneity, and flexibility. A few well-known examples of home-based smart IoT applications include personal and e-healthcare management systems, and Body Area Networks (BANs). Intelligent video surveillance, smart transportation systems, water distribution and network monitoring, smart electricity grids, etc., fall under the utility segment. Smart roads and intelligent sign boards are particular interesting advances in intelligent transportation systems for smart cities. This is a very significant research direction since the widespread use of autonomous vehicles is not far off. IoT applications in road infrastructure can equip road stretches with smart sensing capabilities able to deliver seamless information in real time for intelligent analysis. A few additional opportunities and advances in road infrastructure for smart urban environments include energy-harvesting road pavements; automatic weighing of vehicles to avoid overloading (static weighing, weight-in-motion, high-speed weigh-in-motion, virtual weigh-in-motion); electrified roads and lanes for EV charging; smart digital traffic signals and signs, smart detection of traffic rule violations; roads equipped with V2X and VANETs, enabling vehicle-to-vehicle communication; smart intersections using sensors, V2I, localization and mapping; intelligent architecture that helps in emergency rescue operations; and smart street lights. Apart from these, a considerable number of advances are emerging in other fields relating to smart urban management, including enhanced metering and security of electricity distribution using smart grids, level monitoring and sensor-enabled solutions for smart water monitoring and management.

In spite of so many fascinating advancements, significant economic and engineering challenges remain in the implementation of smart urban cities using IoT, necessitating further research to address the scalability, reliability and privacy issues arising in smart urban IoT applications. Topics of interest include:

• Innovative methods to ensure connectivity in smart mobile devices for intelligent V2X in smart cities.
• Methods to overcome the transition issues in connectivity from device- to network-level data and vice versa.
• Design of a generic and sustainable Internet of Things architecture for smart urban management.
• Enhancing the resilience and cybersecurity of smart urban IoT systems.
• Multimodal traffic using IoT and cloud computing for smart cities.
• Development of a wireless authentication system for Body Area Networks (BANs) for e-healthcare and telemedicine in a smart connected urban environment.
• Intelligent protocols and architecture for traffic management in a self-driving futuristic environment.
• Novel technologies for privacy and crowdsensing in smart urban IoT.
• Design of an intelligent and safe structural design for IoT-based enterprise-level data management.
• Leveraging blockchain for improved reliability in smart city applications.

Prof. Dr. Carlos Enrique Montenegro-Marín
Dr. J. Alfred Daniel
Prof. Dr. Guangjie Han
Guest Editors

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• IOT
• cloud computing
• smart cities
• blockchain
• intelligent V2X