Guest Editorial: Special Issue on (Industrial) Internet-of-Things for Smart and Sensing Systems: Issues, Trends, and Applications

Smart and sensing systems represent a significant research theme that has motivated a number of research initiatives around the world. Smart systems typically consist of different components, including sensors for signal acquisition, communication units for data transmission between components, control, and management units for decision-making, and actuators to perform the appropriate actions. They have impacted applications in many fields, such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy, environment, logistic, defence, monitoring, and mobility. As the complexity of such systems continue to grow, the challenge of developing integrated smart and sensing systems has surpassed the design complexity of their individual components. A smart and sensing system may include a large number of heterogeneous components, subsystems, smart and intelligent sensors, and may combine several correlated functionalities. Thus, the main issue of developing smart and sensing systems lies in the complexity to integrate and to manage these different components, technologies, and goals across a wide spectrum. In recent years, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has amplified the capacity of sensing the world through a network of connected devices using the existing network infrastructure. Grouping together smart and sensing systems in an IoT setting to form large-scale distributed cyber-physical systems has tremendous potential in bringing smart systems to many application domains.