Call for Papers

Smart communities refer to urban cities, rural communities, or combined regions that leverage innovative ICT technologies to benefit residents, visitors, businesses, and organizations with economic growth, social equality, and environmental sustainability. ICT infrastructures play an instrumental role in the expansion of smart community possibilities by providing communication channels and smart community networks to deliver data between sending or receiving entities while meeting data performance requirements. In detail, smart community networks connect a wide range of objects, including people, assets, sensors, vehicles, business, and organizations, with very different computing and resource limitations or performance expectations. Applications run in smart community networks are conducted to support intelligence and automation in different service areas such as transportation, assisted living and healthcare, environment monitoring, agriculture, climate-smart living, energy and facilities, etc. The efficient operation of smart communities requires objects to be interactive and applications to be correlated, increasing complexity in achieving quality networking communications.

These challenges should be tackled collectively at different stages of network development, including architecture design and planning, service design and provision, infrastructure and device deployment, performance management, and network and application evaluation. The aim of this Special Issue (SI) is to offer a panorama of the latest advanced research efforts on developing communication networks and systems for smart communities. We seek high-quality original research studies or novel developments promoting innovations in smart community networks and systems. The discussion of future and emerging challenges, advances, regional/national deployment, applications of smart community networks, artificial intelligence and machine learning for smart community networks, and performance, mobility, and security management are all of interest for this SI.

The SI will publish original, quality, and unpublished research or review articles which should be comprehensible to all readers of the magazine regardless of their speciality. The general scope of this issue covers design, prototyping, implementation, algorithms, protocols, theory, modelling, and literature review of future smart community networks and systems. The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics in scope:

• Network architectures/infrastructures, algorithms, protocols, and evaluation methods for novel smart community services
• Data-driven automation and artificial intelligence in support novel smart community networks and services
• Threats and security in smart community networks and systems
• Autonomous mobility management in smart community networks and systems
• Modeling and theoretical development for smart community networks and services
• Analysis and review of the deployment of regional or national smart community networks
• Case studies or simulations of regional or national smart community networks
• Networking and systems for integrating smart community services across different community sectors
• Integration of multiple smart communities via ICT infrastructures
• Advanced networks and systems for remote smart communities

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the “Information for Author'' section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select “November 2022/Smart Communities" from the drop-down menu of topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Due: 15 July 2022
Initial Decision: 30 August 2022
Revised Manuscript Due: 30 September 2022
Final Decision: 15 October 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 31 October 2022
Publication Date: November/December 2022

Guest Editors

Baek-Young Choi
The University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC), USA

Richard Han
Macquarie University, Australia 

Xian-Sheng Hua
City Brain Lab, Damo Academy, Alibaba Group, China

Dimitra Simeonidou (Co-Lead Editor)
University of Bristol, UK

Wanqing Tu (Co-Lead Editor)
Durham University, United Kingdom

Lipo Wang
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore