Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart eHealth Systems

Guest editors

Athanasios V. Vasilakos, University of Western Macedonia, Greece
Jiafu Wan, South China University of Technology, China
Daqiang Zhang, Tongji University, China
Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain

Scope

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) feature a tight combination and coordination between the system’s computational and physical elements. In recent years, the advances in wireless sensor devices, big data, mobile computing and cloud computing offer tremendous opportunities to realize the seamless integration between the physical world and the cyber space. The Cloud-integrated CPS (CCPS) refers to virtually representing physical system components such as sensors, actuators, robots and other devices in clouds, accessing (e. g., monitoring, actuating and navigating) those physical components through their virtual representations, and processing/managing/controlling the large amount of data collected from physical components in clouds in a scalable, real-time, efficient and reliable manner. Particularly, integrating cloud computing techniques (e.g., virtualization, elastic re-configuration, and multi-tenancy of resources) with CPS techniques (e. g., real-time scheduling, adaptive resource management and control, and embedded system design) will bring hope to advance the state of the art, and allow previously unachievable systems such as cloud-integrated internet of vehicles to be built, deployed, managed, and controlled effectively.
This special issue aims at the following aspects: 1) identifying limitations of the state of the art in CPS, cloud computing, or relevant application domains, and suggesting new research directions that show potential for overcoming those limitations; 2) how approaches in CPS can and should be integrated with approaches in cloud computing, and vice versa, to achieve new capabilities; and 3) designing some novel application scenarios. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include, but are not limited to, the following:
– Cyber-physical networked systems with cloud support
– Cloud-integrated wireless body area networks
– Cloud-integrated industrial CPS
– Cloud-integrated internet of vehicles
– Context awareness in CCPS
– Monitoring, actuation and navigation of physical components in CCPS
– Virtualization of physical components
– Signal/information processing, communication and software architectures
– Cloud architectures and integration techniques
– Spatiotemporal data management and communication
– Resource management and optimization
– Autonomy, adaptability, manageability, reliability, safety and usability of CCPS
– Mobile and pervasive services for CCPS
– Security, privacy and anonymity
– Data acquisition, data analysis, data mining and computational intelligence
– Modeling, simulations and empirical experiments