Worldwide forecasts indicate that the size and population of cities will increase even further. This immense growth will put a strain on resources and pose a major challenge in many aspects of everyday life in urban areas, such as the quality of services in the medical, educational, environmental, public safety, and security sectors, indicatively. Thus, novel methods of management must be put in place for these cities to continue to be sustainable. The wide adoption of pervasive and mobile computing systems gave rise to the term of “smart cities,” which implies the ability of sustainable city growth by leading to major improvements in city management and life in the above-mentioned sectors and other aspects such as energy efficiency, traffic congestion, pollution reduction, parking space, public safety, and recreation. This has been made possible in recent years due to the widespread availability of commodity low-power sensors, smart phones, tablets, and the necessary wireless networking infrastructure, which, along with technologies such as AI and management of big data, may be utilized to address the challenges of sustainable urban environments.

In this special issue, articles regarding the use of technologies, methodologies, and applications for smart cities are invited. Authors are encouraged to submit articles mainly describing original research, presenting results that advance the state of the art and fuel more efforts in the future. Review articles are also welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

- Enabling technologies for smart cities
- Smart city communications infrastructure
- Smart cities data storage, ownership, and access methods
- Ubiquitous sensing and actuation
- Service discovery and composition
- IoT architectures, protocols, and algorithms in smart cities
- ICT solutions for eco-cities (for environmentally friendly transportation, waste management, eco-friendly buildings, etc.)
- Intelligent transportation systems and vehicular networks
- Smart sharing systems and sharing economy
- Smart urban health care
- Reliability, security, safety, privacy, and trust issues
- Smart energy grid
- Smart homes for elderly citizens
- Data management and big data in smart cities
- Crowdsensing and crowdsourcing
- Trends and challenges in smart cities

Authors can submit their manuscripts through the Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/wcmc/srtma/.

Manuscript Due: Friday, 31 March 2017
First Round of Reviews: Friday, 23 June 2017
Publication Date: Friday, 18 August 2017

Guest Editors

Damianos Gavalas, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece
Petros Nicopolitidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Achilles Kameas, Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece
Christos Goumopoulos, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece
Paolo Bellavista, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Lampros Lambrinos, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus
Bin Guo, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China