Guest Editorial: Network Applications Software for Vertical IoT Industry

Network Applications is defined as a set of services that provide certain functionalities to the verticals and their associated use cases. In practice, this software piece consumes the exposed Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs) from the network, e.g., northbound APIs of 5G core network and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), and edge computing APIs. Considering the levels of interaction and trust, Network Applications can either be integrated with (a part of) vertical application or exposes its APIs (e.g., service APIs) to be further consumed by vertical applications. In short, Network Applications could be viewed as a separate middleware layer, which is contributed by both network operators and third parties, to simplify the vertical system deployments on a large scale and extend to vertical IoT industries.