Introduction to the Special Section on Network Science for Internet of Things (IoT)

The papers in this special section examine network science for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications have been growing significantly in recent years and the so-called IoT ecosystem enables seamless connectivity that is paving the way for many applications such as smart home, smart health, connected vehicle, smart grid and others. The network infrastructure, connectivity, and dynamics in the IoT ecosystem are becoming increasingly complex, scalable and heterogeneous, opening up many challenges for network sciences and system engineering including architectural, operational, service and security challenges. In addition, since IoT applications generate huge amounts of network traffic over networks, network issues such complexity, efficiency, dynamics, interferences and interaction and robustness need to be re-examined on a large scale. We aim to leverage them in order to better understand network performance bound, user demands and experience and capacity of the IoT network infrastructure which will enable the network to seamlessly connect to IoT devices and support the emerging applications of IoT users. In summary, research on network sciences and engineering for inter-disciplinary IoT applications is still in its infancy.