IEEE Communications Magazine Call for Papers
Special Issue on Social-aware Communication Networks and Systems and Innovative Social Network Applications and Services

Call for Papers
Social network analysis has been an active area of research for several decades. Ιt has recently though gained a big momentum with the booming popularity of social media, the proliferation of mobile devices and advancement of their capabilities and the semantically enriched user interactions that have exponentially grown, especially during the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. In general, social entities with close relationships (family, friends), sharing similar interests or belonging within the same community, tend to interact more often, more regularly and for longer periods than others, carrying with them an inherent concept of trust. Representing social interactions using directed or undirected graphs with nodes and edges carrying weight and different types of information, researchers have been able to identify users within certain circles of trust / distrust (friends, friends of friends, distrusted entities, friends of distrusted entities, etc.), communities of users sharing similar interests, the most influential users and information / influence flows, and to develop recommender system for users and content. The social dimension, however, cannot be separated from the spatial one: physical proximity affects relations between users, making social ties establishment more likely to succeed. Thus, online social networks and offline social interactions (mostly following users’ mobility patterns) in the physical world can play a crucial role in a multitude of areas.

As a result of the aforementioned considerations, social networks have attracted interest from researchers across multiple disciplines and for a wide range of challenges. Without being exhaustive: developing social-aware networking algorithms for improving various networking operations (most notably routing and information forwarding, resource allocation, content placement/caching/sharing etc.), identifying graph topology structure as well as its evolution, along with information / influence paths for maximizing the impact of information dissemination (with advertisements for new products and services in marketing being a direct application area) and exploring decision making process in a social psychology context (with the Internet of Behaviors forming a new concept to be explored), designing incentive mechanisms for promoting cooperation and establishing trust in order to address security concerns (mostly concerning open, uncertain, highly dynamic and potentially competitive environments, such as Internet of Things). These challenges have often been addressed with the help of emerging informatics and communication technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data analysis, and blockchain.

The aim of this Feature Topic (FT) is to attract original works discussing the state-of-the-art and setting future directions in the area of social-aware networks and advanced applications in the following topical areas.

Prospective authors are invited to submit articles on topics including, but not limited to:
Graph modeling, learning/prediction, social network evolution with application in social-aware networks / systems and advanced applications; simulations, experiments
Recommender systems, community detection with application in social-aware networks / systems and advanced applications
Influence, trust, information propagation & evolution with application in social-aware networks / systems and advanced applications
Detection and mitigation of echo chambers, polarization, radicalization and other societal challenges exacerbated by social media platforms with application in social-aware networks / systems and advanced applications
Platforms, algorithms, systems and techniques integrating AI/blockchain/big data with social networking
Social-aware traffic management
Social-aware network infrastructure
Social-by-engineering design in 6G
Social-aware networking algorithms, techniques and social-aware communication systems
Internet of Things (IoT), Social-IoT, Internet of Behavior (IoB), Social Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of People
Social sensing
Location-based social networks, user activity modeling and exploitation, mobility and behavior data mining
Advanced Innovative social network related applications and services
Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on social networks for social-aware networking and advanced applications
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Author Portal. Select the “FT-2227 / Social-aware communication networks and systems” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 30 April 2023
Decision Notification: 30 July 2023
Final Manuscript: 30 September 2023
Publication: Fourth Quarter 2023