Editorial brief for special issue "Mass connectivity and/or communication paradigms for the internet of things"

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the collective network of connected devices and technologies facilitating the communication between these devices themselves and between the devices and the cloud at a mass scale. These types of networks can be exploited in many applications that can have timeless importance; for instance, they can be utilized in detecting and preventing both natural and human-made disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. Due to ongoing global warming and human-caused pollution, these types of disasters will continue to occur. Therefore, it’s crucial to develop IoT systems that can prevent them as a whole or lessen their long-term impact to the most part. While in operation, the failure of any node or communication link can lead to data loss and network connectivity disruption, resulting in significant burdens. Therefore, maintaining network connectivity and effectively recovering lost information using network resources remain as an elusive open problem.

Connected smart devices collect a massive amount of information and continuously transmit it for storage and subsequent analysis. Such operation style leads to a heavy load on network communication links, connectivity, and computational resources and subsequently increases the demand for required storage space. As a result, fundamental techniques need to be devised to reduce the demand for such resources. For instance, to reduce the infrastructure cost of the topology and increase fault tolerance, recent research focused on minimizing the number of devices guaranteeing maximal area coverage for a given network topology. Besides reducing the cost of the deployed infrastructure, minimization of the number of devices takes the communication cost into consideration typically expressed in terms of consumed bandwidth Preprint submitted to Elsevier IoT Journal January 24, 2025 or the time elapsed during the device-to-device transfer as the parameters of interest. Accordingly, the focus on reducing such communication overhead using deterministic or/with heuristic solutions is vital for optimal IoT ecosystem design.

In this special issue, the focus has been on the new and broader technical problems which are related to the connectivity, communication costs, resource sharing and providing resilience for IoT core networks, devices, and applications.