Dear Colleagues,

This MDPI Applied Sciences Special issue focuses on the debate on aspects concerning networking architectures and protocols for a global IoT, with particular focus for Industrial IoT and challenges that may arise in future environments. The Special Issue envisions the following main aspects:

- Architectural and evolutionary vision of IoT networking protocols and architectures, including the support of multi-party communication (decentralized communication), QoS, integrated security, mobility, and intelligence (context-awareness, behavior learning, and inference).
- Architectural integration aspects, in particular solutions that address a better interaction between applications and infrastructure, e.g., derived from semantic technologies.
- Edge networking aspects for IoT optimization, such as distribution/orchestration of networking functions to best support data processing and aggregation, mobility, resilience, and power saving.
- Network performance measurements that assist in understanding the performance of the current available communication protocols in a variety of scenarios, including industrial IoT scenarios.
- Design and evaluation of scenarios exploiting architectural, user-centric, and content-centric paradigms, e.g., information centric networking.
- Design and evaluation of decentralized edge architectures, e.g., involving end-user devices (far edge) and near edge devices for industrial environments.
- Deterministic wireless solutions and scenarios, e.g., application of wireless solutions in closed-loop industrial environments, as well as long-range communication scenarios.
- Protocol interoperability discussion and evaluation, in particular solutions that can assist in the automated support of data interoperability.
- Integration of AI on decentralized Edge environments, e.g., methods to optimize AI, decentralized AI approaches applicable both to the edge (including end-user devices) and cloud; and evaluation of AI solutions/ML models and their suitability to advanced scenarios, e.g., for massive mobile IoT support.


Guest Editor: Rute C. Sofia, fortiss GmbH, Munich