Call for Papers

Recently, blockchain has attracted much attention from both the academia and industry ranging from finance, healthcare, entertainment, over to supply chain, transportation etc. It is highly expected that blockchain will bring a vast array of opportunities to the development of the next-generation information technologies, and to trigger a new round of technological innovation and industrial transformation in the context of future communication technologies. However, current blockchain technology still suffers from critical challenges, including the threats of malicious behaviours and the lack of standardisation and limited interoperability, which significantly hinder the large-scale deployment of blockchain applications. To develop new blockchain technologies for future communication and networking, the challenges of current blockchains, such as low throughput, high latency, poor scalability, malicious mining/transaction behaviors, and vulnerable codes in smart contracts developed on blockchains, must be addressed. The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have promising potential to overcome these challenges, thus spawning an emerging direction referred to as Intelligent Blockchain. For instance, deep reinforcement learning can be utilized to achieve intelligent computation resource allocation, while supervised machine learning may help to capture the abnormal behaviours in blockchain and transactions, detect possible vulnerable program codes in smart contracts, and so on. Combined with the powerful AI approaches, intelligent blockchain is expected to play as a game-changing role in future communications and networking, since it can be exploited to provide innovative solutions to lots of emerging research issues in the next-generation communications and networking, e.g., secure data transmission, malicious behaviors monitoring, intelligent access permission control and resource allocation. To better support future communications and networking, intelligent blockchain calls for new ideas, theories, designs, mechanisms, frameworks, and technologies. We seek to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to present their latest findings, advancements, and achievements in the field of intelligent blockchain-empowered communications and networking. The topics include, but not limited to, the following:

• Novel Architectures of Intelligent Blockchain for Future Networking and Communication
• AI-inspired Consensus Algorithms, Protocols and mechanisms for Intelligent Blockchain
• AI-driven Networking and Communications for Future Blockchain
• AI-empowered Malicious Behavior Detection of Smart Contacts for Intelligent Blockchain
• AI-enable Incentive Mechanisms for Intelligent Blockchain
• AI-based Dynamic Resource Allocation and Management for Smart Blockchain
• Security and Privacy Issues with Solutions for Intelligent Blockchain
• Cross-chain or Sharding Technologies for Scalable Blockchain
• Quality of Service (QoS) Improvement for Intelligent Blockchain/Smart Contract Services
• Intelligent Blockchain-enabled Applications for Future Networking and Communications
• Multi-agent Blockchain-based System for Future Networking and Communications
• Decentralized or Collaborative AI for Future Communications and Networks
• Proof-of-Concept Blockchains for Future Networking and Communications: Experimental Prototyping and Testbeds

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts submitted to this special issue should be prepared in accordance with IEEE JSAC format. Papers must be submitted electronically through EDAS.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 March 2022
First Notification: 31 May 2022
Acceptance Notification: 30 June 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 23 July 2022
Publication Date: Fourth Quarter 2022

Guest Editors