Special Issue: ICT Trends for Future Smart World (original) (raw)

Predicting the trends in info-communication technologies and their applications is not an easy task. It is even more difficult following dramatic changes and constantly rising opportunities for innovation. Nowadays, info-communication technologies are developed as centered on integration platforms with wide ranges of implemented services and applications. Such applications and services are offered to the society for fostering the evolutions of the modern living and working in smart environments. They represent a topic that calls for exchange of various knowhow from developers, researchers, stakeholders, business/regulatory/civil sector etc., so that the research and development challenges to create a smart world would be efficiently addressed.

The primary goal of future info-communication integration platforms is in line with the paradigm of being connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone. In such circumstances the communication should be based on interoperable protocols, operating in heterogeneous scenarios. In this context, Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered as a generic platform where all objects play an active role in creating smart environments. It is a multidisciplinary eco system that encompasses a wide range of various scenarios and technologies, application domains, business strategies, industry stakeholders. Thus, there is no doubt that the evolution of ICT towards creating integration platforms implies the significance of such vision and its impact on future societal, networking and communications landscape. In that manner, a smart world will be becoming our reality, with a number of attractive applications: smart cities and environments, smart grids, industrial automation, traffic management and logistics, remote monitoring, healthcare and assisted living, agriculture, public safety…

This special issue is mainly composed of the extended versions of selected papers presented at the 4th Center of TeleInFrastrukture—South-East Europe (CTIF SEE) Workshop: “Wireless applications and their societal impacts”, 29 September 2015, Budva, Montenegro.

Further more, the issue also includes selected papers following the call for submissions of original research papers, both theoretical and practice-oriented, from academia, industrial professionals and students from various engineering fields, as well as innovative approaches and ideas regarding the ICT trends relevant for the creation of smart living and working environments.

We hope that this special issue will contribute to further research in the field of ICT with the focus on development of the smart world based on integration platforms providing new smart services and applications. The selected papers present the state-of-the art in the various aspects of research on ICT trends, offering an opportunity to the readers and researchers to pursue with their work on the issues still related with a number of challenges and open issues.

Finally, we would like to thank all the authors for their contributions, the reviewers for their valuable time and effort, as well as the members of the editorial team of the journal for their constructive support. Without this joint effort and commitment this issue could not be prepared.