Internet of Things: Towards a Smart and Sustainable Future

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged in the last decade as the backbone of the data revolution currently sweeping the world in its business, social, and political facets. As a result, in this last decade alone, humanity has produced quantities of data that exceed what it produced in all of its past history combined together. IoT systems have become part and parcel of most modern organisations nowadays, be it in factories, environment, healthcare, or defense, or indeed, in any other aspect of our lives.

However, is such IoT proliferation, and the associated smart data-driven environments it creates, sustainable? It is the aim of this Special Issue to investigate possible answers to this question stemming from current research.

The definition of what sustainability means is still a topic of much debate in literature, as the very term itself refers to future events relating to existing states of systems, organisations, technologies, and the resources underlying those states, and how these can be maintained in the most optimal form. In the context of computational systems, sustainability aims to identify, formalise, and provide solutions to computational problems concerning the balancing of environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. Such solutions have to be “smart” in nature, in order to account for, and harness, a landscape of IoT technology and IoT data that is ever-increasing in its complexity. This Special Issue seeks original papers that contribute to the understanding of the various forms of what such IoT-based smart and sustainable technological future might look like. We invite scientific research papers based on rigorous models of reasoning that suggest viable directions for such a future to emerge. We also welcome empirical works of every variety, including case studies, disciplines, or sustainability challenges, as well as surveys that critique the current state of the art related to the topics of this issue, and suggest a vision beyond that state. Finally, we welcome conceptual papers that present ideas, which may not be fully developed or validated but that reveal new horizons for the sustainability of complex IoT systems.

Topics related to this Special Issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Formal models of IoT systems, technologies, protocols, and standards (ecosystems) that define sustainability as a property of the system and demonstrate how such ecosystems maintain sustainability;
• Case studies that demonstrate real-world scenarios of how IoT ecosystems were sustained and how that impacted their local environment and problem domain;
• Data analysis methods applied to sample datasets in demonstrating the sustainability of IoT ecosystems, with possible definitions of new analytical methods geared toward sustainability;
• Machine learning and its application to the creation of a sustainable IoT ecosystem;
• Challenges to the sustainability of IoT ecosystems, from a technosocietal point of view;
• New definitions for sustainability within the context of existing IoT ecosystems that could lead to the emergence of future IoT ecosystems;

Issues related to IoT ecosystems in a smart world that are of a non-functional nature, e.g., security, safety, performance, availability, and others, that may impact the sustainability of IoT ecosystems.

Dr. Benjamin Aziz
Dr. Alaa Mohasseb
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• formal reasoning
• data science
• sustainable IoT
• smart IoT
• machine learning
• IoT sustainability case studies