Special Issue on “Moving from Wireless Sensor Networks towards the Internet of Things: Future Trends and Research Challenges”

Over the years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have experienced an unprecedented growth in terms of applications, interfacing, scalability, interoperability and data computation. WSNs are playing a key role in several application domains such as transportation, smart grid, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. This wide range of technologies and applications has created new deployment and integration scenarios using WSNs. The current perspective is to avoid proprietary standards and embrace Internet Protocol (IP)–based sensor networks with non-proprietary and open standards. This allows the connectivity of WSNs with Internet and enables different objects to be involved in the Internet of Things (IoT). WSNs are providing a virtual layer in which information about the physical world can be accessed by any computational system. Thus, WSNs are considered a valuable asset for bringing the vision of IoT into reality. The IoT environment is highly dynamic and heterogeneous due to the presence of different objects at different times. In this environment, scalability and interoperability seem to be a huge concern. Thus, it requires having a layered architecture that eliminates the need for any specific language, protocol, operating system, or specific technology dependency. Moreover, the IoT infrastructure needs to utilize the ownership of the data in a distributed manner. As a result, things can control the sharing of information to other object and entities.

The evolution of IoT applications from WSNs requires novel approaches for network design and modeling. Such approaches need to consider the speed, capacity and mobility, required for an interoperable communication among the physical-world objects of an IoT paradigm. The IoT applications impose several technical challenges on a WSN design. These challenges include the data rate and connection range, low-powered operation and maintenance, security and privacy, reliability and timeliness, and efficient data aggregation and processing. In addition, as we move toward IoT era, it is a challenge to integrate WSNs in legacy environments with legacy technologies with other IoT elements. Even though there have been several pioneering works taking not only an evolutionary approach but also a revolutionary approach to design a WSN for IoT applications, much effort is still required to crystallize the concept of IoT into ubiquitous services.

This special issue aims to attract high-quality research from academia and industry on the recent advances in different aspects of WSN design for IoT applications. Particularly, we solicit original research articles that solve problems, provide functionality, optimize tasks, and stimulate the continuing efforts to new activities in designing WSNs for IoT applications. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the ones listed below.

• Integration of WSNs and Internet of Things
• Scalable WSN architectures for Internet of Things
• Quality of Service support for Internet of Things
• Scalable Resource Management for Internet of Things Objects
• Scalability and sustainability issues in WSNs and Internet of Things
• Efficient data delivery, aggregation, and processing for Internet of Things
• Autonomous control and management for Internet of Things
• Transition mechanisms
• Congestion-avoidance and mitigation techniques for Internet of Things
• Energy saving and harvesting for Internet of Things
• Cross-layer design for Internet of Things
• Security, privacy, and system integrity for Internet of Things
• Operational and management issues for scalable Internet of Things
• Experience and case studies
• Big data issues for WSNs and Internet of Things
• Standardization effort

Important Dates:

• Paper Submission Due: October 1, 2021
• First-round Notification: December 15, 2021
• Revision Submission: January 31, 2022
• Notification of Final Decision: March 15, 2022
• Submission of Final Paper: April 15, 2022
• Publication date: 2nd/3rd Quarter of 2018

Guest Editors:

• Mian Ahmad Jan, PhD, Assistant Professor, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Pakistan
• Zhiyuan Tan, PhD, Lecturer, Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom
• Xiangjian He, PhD, Professor, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
• Wei Ni, PhD, Senior Scientist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia

Submission Instructions:

• Read the Information for Authors
• Submit your manuscript at the Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks Journal webpage and follow the submission procedure. Please, select the “Moving from Wireless Sensor Networks towards the Internet of Things: Future Trends and Research Challenges” in Journal Section.
• Early submissions are welcome. We will start the review process as soon as we receive your contributions.