With the advent of cloud computing and the onset of Internet-of-Things (IoT), the amount of data that must be collected through sensors, sent through the communication networks, and processed in the cloud servers have grown tremendously at a very rapid rate. Cloud-centric IoT are facing the problem of not only communication latencies, but also inefficient data processing and applications that were supposed to be smart are not meeting the expectations. For example, smart grids and smart traffic have yet to overcome not only infrastructure issues but also security and performance issues related to data collection and processing. To address this issue, fog/edge computing was proposed. Fog computing focuses on the collaboration of end-user devices for data storage, communication, control, configuration, and management such that computations that were carried out formerly in the clouds are now partially offloaded to the network edges (local nodes) such that the latencies between the end users and the cloud can be reduced significantly and the results of data processing obtained more efficiently. Through such a computing service at the edge of networks, better quality-of-service (QoS) and data analytics can be achieved. However, fog computing currently still faces several challenges, especially with respect to communication efficiency, architecture design, intelligent management, and data security. As a result, investigation into how to provide a powerful and stable infrastructure of receiving and processing information is thus urgently required.

In the age of wireless communications and mobile computing, fog computing will play a major role in terms of lower power usage (such as the latest Narrow-Band IoT), embedded intelligence (such as in cyber-physical systems), and software-defined functions (such as in Software-Defined Networking).

Related investigators are invited to contribute original research articles that contribute to varying methods for fog computing for smart systems and applications. We are particularly interested in articles describing emerging communication infrastructure designs, adaptive schemes, management policies, and reviews of the state-of-the art.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

Fog/edge computing architecture for mobile wireless applications
Middleware and runtime kernels for fog/edge infrastructures
Modeling fog/edge infrastructures
Low power design in wireless fog computing
Synergy between cyber-physical systems and fog computing
Fog/edge data security
Fog/edge performance monitoring, including testing and verification
Fog/edge storage
Application off-loading mechanisms in fog/edge computing
Load balancing/scheduling in fog/edge computing
Artificial intelligence in fog/edge computing (deep learning, etc.)
Applications for fog/edge computing
Review of fog/edge computing development
Authors can submit their manuscripts through the Manuscript Tracking System at https://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/wcmc/fcss/.

Submission Deadline Friday, 23 February 2018
Publication Date July 2018
Papers are published upon acceptance, regardless of the Special Issue publication date.

Lead Guest Editor
Pao-Ann Hsiung, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan
Guest Editors
Chun-Hsian Huang, National Taitung University, Taitung, Taiwan
Marco D. Santambrogio, Politecnico Milano, Milano, Italy
Marilyn Wolf, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA