Scope

The increasing availability of smart objects will radically change our cities. It is in fact a common opinion that, in the near future, our cities will be populated by an incredibly higher number of devices that actively participate to the execution of pervasive and advanced services. Being massively distributed into the environment, such devices may generate, collect, exchange and process big data, provide distributed services, offer computational resources, and cooperate to perform some tasks locally, as well as to delegate their execution to more powerful nodes in the infrastructure or at the network edge.

At the same time, citizens roaming around the city may be considered as mobile probes that, by making uses of cyber and physical data accessible by smartphones, will analyze the situation and will produce reports to the community. Furthermore the citizen’s smartphones will actively contribute in creating the communication infrastructure by forwarding data coming from surrounding devices thus partially relieving the communication infrastructure from the heavy burden of the huge amount of data produced in the envisioned scenario.

All in all, cities are going to become a new complex ecosystem which has the potentiality to offer many amazing features and support innovative application. Unfortunately, we are still far from the full exploitation of the potentialities offered by such an ecosystem. The communication systems so far developed are mainly conceived to connect people, and they hardly adapt to connect devices. So that, Massive Machine Type Communications represents one of the use cases for the development of the forthcoming 5G cellular system. Also, since every day, new heterogeneous devices are added  to and removed from our cities, it is mandatory to develop some framework capable to  manage such an  high-dynamic systems. In addition, such systems are required to be capable to evolve their functionalities over time, according to changes in their finalities. As a consequence, they should support the possibility to add, update, and remove functionalities depending on the available devices and services.

The CoWPER workshop aims to solicit contributions on novel algorithms, methodological studies and experimentations on how to enable the formerly described ecosystem. Specifically, on how devise a city-wide networking and management  infrastructure capable to efficiently guarantee communication in the new envisaged ecosystem, to manage the complexity of heterogeneous devices and access technologies, and to guarantee robust, ubiquitous, and secure connectivity over the urban environments.

In line with such objectives, original contributions are solicited in topics of interest including, but not limited to, the following:

• Models of network components’ interactions on a smart-city
• Self-organizing wireless networks for pervasive urban access;
• Distributed Sensing and Control in Smart Cities;
• Mobile-aware cloud computing models, infrastructures, and approaches for smart cities
• Smartphone-based sensing systems, tools, applications in Smart City environments;
• Smartphone and mobile systems and applications;
• Cyber-physical interactions with smartphones;
• Crowd sourcing in smart cities;
• IoT architectures and middleware for smart cities;
• Novel communication protocols for M2M/MTC Communications;
• Device-2-Device Communications (D2D);
• Dynamic trust management models for Smartphone based networks and applications;
• Cooperation incentive models for Smartphone based networks and applications;
• Reliability, Security, Privacy and Trust in smart cities ecosystems;