Sustainable Development of Smart Cities with Edge Computing Techniques

Theme and Scope

The advent of modern technologies has enabled the growth of developing smart cities with a variety of automated services. This leads to the massive deployment of smart infrastructure with advanced sensing capabilities that are networked into an automated smart city system. Moreover, the entire environment of sensing elements is typically connected across the cloud or a centralized system. However, the process of computation of data received from numerous smart devices is highly critical often results in higher latency measures. Internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing form an integral part of developing smart cities and offers numerous smart services to the end-users. Since the IoT devices are highly data-intensive and resource-constrained in nature, the use of edge computing technologies could offer significant benefits to the smart environment. Smart cities deal with various complexities including wired, wireless, mobile, sensor, optical, and other related network technologies edge computing can be an optimized solution in building a smart infrastructure with reduced bottlenecks. Besides, Edge Computing integrates technologies like IoT, Cloud Computing, and Big Data into a common platform to deliver state of the art services.

Edge computing methodologies can efficiently process sensor data obtained from various smart city locations such as public or private transports, Industrial areas, healthcare, logistics, environment, and many more on a real-time basis at the device end. This data is further sent to the centralized servers or a cloud server for further storage and processing processes. Besides, with a robust edge computing model across edge networks or gateways at the device location increases the effectiveness of the devices and minimizes the network load to a great extent. There are many layer and data protocols available like Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), Near Field Communication (NFC), Zigbee, Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Extensible Messaging and Present Protocol (XMPP), Lightweight Local Automation Protocol (LLAP), and many more which can be used in synchronization of data in order to recover from the network-based errors.

However, the process of convergence of edge computing methodologies for smart cities possesses significant challenges such as hardware limitations at the device side, minor data losses, security breaches, etc., The use of edge computing for smart city applications efficiently deals with these challenges and offer significant benefits. This special issue invites experimental, conceptual, and theoretical contributions based on edge-computing techniques and other integration of various networking paradigms in the development of a smart city.

The topics of interest for the special issue include, but are not limited to the following:

• Smart edge networks for IoT devices
• Convergence of IoT, edge computing, cloud computing and blockchain for smart cities
• Fog/edge computing architectures for smart cities
• Combined effect of blockchain and edge computing for IoT smart cities
• Relationship between IoT, edge, and cloud systems in smart city scenarios
• Resource management and performance optimization with edge networks for smart city applications
• Edge systems applications and services for smart cities
• Fault-tolerance, availability, and replication of the edge devices
• Edge computing for smart devices and wearable technologies
• Ethical computational intelligence for smart city edge computing applications (smart buildings, smart transportation systems, smart lighting systems, and many more)
• Wireless networking architectures and protocols for edge computing
• Blockchain enabled edge computing and intelligence (artificial intelligence, smart contract techniques, machine learning, transfer learning and federated learning)
• Robust and efficient convergence of fog/edge computing with IoT smart applications
•  Information-Centric Networking and Edge Computing enabled Smart Cities

Instructions for Manuscripts

Each paper, written in English, the maximum words number in each paper should be below 8,000 words, including references and illustrations. More information can be found at http://jit.ndhu.edu.tw. Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at https://jit.ndhu.edu.tw/about/submissions#authorGuidelines. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/internet-tech.  When submitting papers, authors should specify that the manuscript is for Special Issue on “Sustainable Development of Smart Cities with Edge Computing Techniques”. The manuscript template can be found at https://jit.ndhu.edu.tw/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

Important Dates:

Guest Editors:

Dr. Ching-Hsien Hsu [Leading Guest Editor]

Fellow of IET

Chair Professor and Dean,

College of Information and Electrical Engineering

Department of Computer Science,

Asia University, Taiwan

Email: robertchh@asia.edu.tw

Dr. AmAmir H. Alavi

Assistant Professor,

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,

Department of Bioengineering,

Swanson School of Engineering,

University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Email: alavi@pitt.edu

Dr. Mianxiong Dong 

Department of Sciences and Informatics

Muroran Institute of Technology

Email: mx.dong@csse.muroran-it.ac.jp