Introduction to the Special Section on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for Network Technologies

The papers in this special section examines the deployment of Big Data and artificial intelligence for network technologies. The eneration of huge amounts of data, called big data, is creating the need for efficient tools to manage those data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the powerful tool in dealing with big data with recent breakthroughs at multiple fronts in machine learning, including deep learning. Meanwhile, information networks are becoming larger and more complicated, generating a huge amount of runtime statistics data such as traffic load, resource usages. The emerging big data and AI technologies may include a bunch of new requirements, applications and scenarios such as e-health, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and smart cities in the term of computing networks. The big data and AI driven network technologies also provide an unprecedented patient to discover new features, to characterize user demands and system capabilities in network resource assignment, security and privacy, system architecture, modeling and applications, which needs more explorations. The focus of this special section is to address the big data and artificial intelligence for network technologies. We appreciate contributions to this special section and the valuable and extensive efforts of the reviewers. The topics of this special section range from big data and AI algorithms, models, architecture for networks and systems to network architecture,