Internet of Things Technologies for Smart Cities

A special issue of IoT (ISSN 2624-831X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2021) | Viewed by 12213

Special Issue Editors

Department of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, 41121 Modena MO, Italy
Interests: context-aware computing; vehicular networks; privacy; IoT
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dipartimento di Informatica - Scienza e Ingegneria, Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40126 Bologna, Italy
Interests: mobile crowdsensing; data analytics; Pervasive and Ubiquitous computing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

The Internet of Things is permeating every single aspect of our lives, as the number of connected objects has long surpassed the world population, making such a paradigm a disruptive support for decision making in social, industrial, and urban scenarios. In particular, Smart Cities gain an impressive advantage from IoT pervasive infrastructures that are built around citizens. Requirements for such paradigms are platforms and applications which are context-aware and adaptable to social scenarios. On a city-wide scale, such paradigms bring along well-known challenges from many points of view, both technological and societal.

Coordinating a network of things among each other is not an easy task, which raises challenges which span from data science to ontologies, and from machine learning algorithms to social network analysis. For instance, we face the problem of IoT islands with little or no interoperability with each other, caused by the variety of standards and ad hoc solutions. Furthermore, building-pervasive infrastructure often means dealing with high costs, for which data integration and collaborative paradigms such as mobile crowdsensing have been demonstrated to be effective solutions. Lastly, many other challenges for city-wide scenarios are in need of crucial solutions, such as user privacy, ubiquitous connectivity, modeling, and big data information inference.

Last but not least, the potential of Smart-Cities-oriented solutions is pushing governments to commit significant funding in the form of scientific and industrial projects that will meet expectations for the improvement of socially measurable benefits and to face effectively possible emergencies.

Dr. Luca Bedogni
Dr. Federico Montori
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. IoT is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1200 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

  • Smart Cities
  • Crowdsensing
  • Environmental monitoring
  • Pervasive computing
  • Privacy
  • Big Data for IoT

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

26 pages, 3458 KiB  
Article
A Greedy Scheduling Approach for Peripheral Mobile Intelligent Systems
by Ghassan Fadlallah, Djamal Rebaine and Hamid Mcheick
IoT 2021, 2(2), 249-274; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/iot2020014 - 30 Apr 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3198
Abstract
Smart, pervasive devices have recently experienced accelerated technological development in the fields of hardware, software, and wireless connections. The promotion of various kinds of collaborative mobile computing requires an upgrade in network connectivity with wireless technologies, as well as enhanced peer-to-peer communication. Mobile [...] Read more.
Smart, pervasive devices have recently experienced accelerated technological development in the fields of hardware, software, and wireless connections. The promotion of various kinds of collaborative mobile computing requires an upgrade in network connectivity with wireless technologies, as well as enhanced peer-to-peer communication. Mobile computing also requires appropriate scheduling methods to speed up the implementation and processing of various computing applications by better managing network resources. Scheduling techniques are relevant to the modern architectural models that support the IoT paradigm, particularly smart collaborative mobile computing architectures at the network periphery. In this regard, load-balancing techniques have also become necessary to exploit all the available capabilities and thus the speed of implementation. However, since the problem of scheduling and load-balancing, which we addressed in this study, is known to be NP-hard, the heuristic approach is well justified. We thus designed and validated a greedy scheduling and load-balancing algorithm to improve the utilization of resources. We conducted a comparison study with the longest cloudlet fact processing (LCFP), shortest cloudlet fact processing (SCFP), and Min-Min heuristic algorithms. The choice of those three algorithms is based on the efficiency and simplicity of their mechanisms, as reported in the literature, for allocating tasks to devices. The simulation we conducted showed the superiority of our approach over those algorithms with respect to the overall completion time criterion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Things Technologies for Smart Cities)
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17 pages, 7271 KiB  
Article
Sensing and Forecasting Crowd Distribution in Smart Cities: Potentials and Approaches
by Alket Cecaj, Marco Lippi, Marco Mamei and Franco Zambonelli
IoT 2021, 2(1), 33-49; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/iot2010003 - 08 Jan 2021
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 4889
Abstract
The possibility of sensing and predicting the movements of crowds in modern cities is of fundamental importance for improving urban planning, urban mobility, urban safety, and tourism activities. However, it also introduces several challenges at the level of sensing technologies and data analysis. [...] Read more.
The possibility of sensing and predicting the movements of crowds in modern cities is of fundamental importance for improving urban planning, urban mobility, urban safety, and tourism activities. However, it also introduces several challenges at the level of sensing technologies and data analysis. The objective of this survey is to overview: (i) the many potential application areas of crowd sensing and prediction; (ii) the technologies that can be exploited to sense crowd along with their potentials and limitations; (iii) the data analysis techniques that can be effectively used to forecast crowd distribution. Finally, the article tries to identify open and promising research challenges. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Things Technologies for Smart Cities)
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19 pages, 5178 KiB  
Article
Visual and Artistic Effects of an IoT System in Smart Cities: Research Flow
by Mariana-Daniela González-Zamar and Emilio Abad-Segura
IoT 2020, 1(2), 161-179; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/iot1020011 - 27 Sep 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3278
Abstract
In smart cities, the progress of technology has allowed the implementation of sensors, originating the Internet of Things (IoT) and making cities safer and more sustainable. Hence, the presence of elements that generate visual and artistic effects of IoT technology can make a [...] Read more.
In smart cities, the progress of technology has allowed the implementation of sensors, originating the Internet of Things (IoT) and making cities safer and more sustainable. Hence, the presence of elements that generate visual and artistic effects of IoT technology can make a great contribution to the provision of information that the urbanite needs. The aim of this study is to analyze worldwide research on the visual and artistic effects of IoT in smart cities. Bibliometric techniques were utilized on 1278 articles on this subject matter for the period of 2010–2019 to achieve results on activity production. This has increased yearly, where in the last triennium, it has accumulated 85.21% of documents. Computer science and engineering were the most prominent subject areas where the articles were classified. The lines of research in the development of this research topic have been detected. Furthermore, the main directions for future research have also been identified. This study aims to contribute to highlighting the drivers of this field of research, in addition to providing the available information and future directions to improve academic and scientific discussion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Things Technologies for Smart Cities)
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