Special Issue on Next-Generation IoT Urban Computing and Mobile Networks for Sustainable and Smart Mobility
Día de Entrega: 2026-04-30

The ever-growing population and expected agglomeration in big cities will increase challenges regarding transportation and urban mobility, cities livability, safety, and environmental efficiency. With the ever-increasing demand for more efficient, greener, inclusive, and safer urban centers, reliable and distributed transformative wireless services will be required to support a plethora of smart applications, such as intelligent transportation systems, smart mobility, and infotainment services for high mobile users in public and private transportation networks towards efficient, green, safe, and enjoyable urban mobility.

This vision requires a pervasive, ubiquitous, intelligent, and adaptive wireless access and networking core technologies for the provisioning of highly reliable and ultra-low latency services for interoperable communication and multimedia content distribution in smart mobility applications. With huge improvements over the past generations, 5G/B5G and 6G networks will have tremendous potential to satisfy highly dynamic traffic and stringent delay requirements of rich and heterogeneous mobile services and intelligent transportation systems. However, it will require the high-density deployment of many small base stations and drone-based mobile base stations, which will bring many open issues to be addressed, including the design of mobility-enabled resource management for small cells, multimedia content cache and delivery on the B5G/6G network edge, and architectures for interoperable communication among heterogeneous mobile entities. Besides, Urban Computing emerges as a play role to enhance IoT data collection from urban environments. UC systems enable data integration from various urban sources along with actuators, data analytics, and inference techniques to generate valuable insights into city dynamics, which can drive the development of novel solutions for sustainable and smart mobility in urban centers.

This special issue seeks high-quality and original technical contributions in the field of mobility management and B5G/6G wireless access to efficiently support the vision of smart mobility and mobile services for urban computing. Submissions will be judged on their originality, significance, clarity, relevance, and technical correctness. High-quality survey papers are also welcome. Submitted papers must not be under consideration in any other venue(s). Moreover, submitted contributions must demonstrate relevance to the context of sustainable and smart mobility and urban computing. Manuscripts that do not directly address this theme will be considered out of scope and will be desk rejected.

Topics of interests include, but are certainly not limited to:

    IoT and sensor networks for transportation systems
    Internet of Drones for transportation management
    IoT urban computing systems for efficient data collection
    Distributed, hierarchical, and mobile caching systems for smart transportation
    AI-based solutions for the intelligent and autonomous management of B5G/6G network and wireless access
    AI-based modeling and analysis for B5G/6G mobile communications
    Augmented and virtual reality systems for smart mobility and transportation
    Modeling, analysis, and characterization of urban mobility
    B5G/6G-enabled mobile cloud and edge computing for mobile applications
    Architectures, techniques, and applications of B5G/6G -enabled mobile intelligent edge cloud
    Machine learning algorithms and systems for B5G/6G -enabled edge computing
    Information-centric networking architectures for B5G/6G mobile services
    Mobility-assisted content caching on 5G/6G small cells
    Mobility-assisted protocols for efficient D2D communication
    Architectures, protocols, and algorithms for efficient interconnection of smart mobile objects
    Mobility-enabled resource management on B5G/6G networks
    B5G/6G -enabled multimedia-based smart mobility applications
    Energy-efficient mobile B5G/6G networking infrastructure for transportation systems

Guest editors:

Prof. Rodolfo Coutinho
Concordia University, Canada

Prof. Michela Meo
Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Manuscript submission information:

The journal's submission platform (Editorial Manager®) will be open for submissions to this Special Issue from Feburary 25, 2026. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript and select the article type of “VSI: Next-Generation IoT Urban Computing” when submitting your manuscript online. Both the Guide for Authors and the submission portal could be found on the Journal Homepage: Computer Communications | Journal | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier.

The impact of SI contributions should be clearly demonstrated in the context of the theme of the special issue. Papers that do not directly address this theme are considered out of scope and are subject to immediate rejection.

Timeline:

Submission Open Date *25/02/2026
Final Manuscript Submission Deadline *30/04/2026
Editorial Acceptance Deadline *15/08/2026

Keywords:

smart mobility; sustainable mobility, urban computing; intelligent transportation systems; mobile networks for transportation systems; next-gen wireless networks for smart mobility

Special Issue on Selected Papers from the 21th Wireless On-demand Network systems and Services Conference (WONS 2026)
Día de Entrega: 2026-07-31

WONS is a small, single track, selective conference that follows and often anticipate the novelties in "On-Demand Networking", i.e., all the topics related to wireless networking outside the main stream of cellular networks and services that are provided where and when they are needed.

The Special Issue aims to collect the best papers from WONS and publish an archival version of the research first presented at WONS 2026. Submission is by invitation only. It focuses on different types of wireless LANs, but also NextG cellular, mesh and sensor networks, cloud networks, vehicular networks, non-terrestrial networks, and in-body networks. The challenges of this exciting research field are numerous. They include how to provide robust services in highly dynamic, mobile, and extreme environments, how to minimize energy demands or zero out battery usage in favor of renewable energy sources, how to smartly blend multiple wireless technologies available to a network node, and how to make wireless on-demand networks and services self-configurable, adaptive, self-organizing, and self-healing.

Guest editors:

Renato Lo Cigno
Professor, University of Brescia, Italy, WONS Steering Committee Chair
Email: renato.locigno@unibs.itGianluca Rizzo

Senior Researcher HES-SO, 
WONS 2026 General Chair
Email: gianluca.rizzo@hevs.ch 

Leonardo Maccari
Associate Professor, University of Venice 'Ca Foscari, Italy, WONS 2026 TPC chair
Email: leonardo.maccari@unive.it 
Omran Ayoub, 
Associate Professor, SUPSI, Switzerland, WONS 2026 TPC Chair
Email: omran.ayoub@supsi.ch 

Manuscript submission information:

The journal's submission platform (Editorial Manager®) will be open for submissions to this Special Issue from May 1st, 2026. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript and select the article type of “VSI: WONS 2026” when submitting your manuscript online. Both the Guide for Authors and the submission portal could be found on the Journal Homepage: Computer Communications | Journal | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier.

The impact of SI contributions should be clearly demonstrated in the context of the theme of the special issue. Papers that do not directly address this theme are considered out of scope and are subject to immediate rejection.

Timeline:

Submission Open Date *01/05/2026
Final Manuscript Submission Deadline *31/07/2026
Editorial Acceptance Deadline *15/01/2027

Keywords:

On-Demand Networks and Services; Future Wireless Networks; Task Specific Networks and Services; Next Generation Mobile Networks