Call for Papers

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths all over the world. This has strained the health care systems and economies of many countries and changed the way people live and work. In order to reduce the number of cases, social distancing, isolation and contact tracking have been widely deployed. Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) played major role in supporting our new lifestyle, involving self-quarantine, working from home, virtual conferencing, online education and remote patient monitoring. Data collection, processing and analytics, surveillance, contact tracing, and eHealth, are utilized to face, and control the impact of, the pandemic.

This Feature Topic (FT) aims at soliciting high-quality articles covering the research and development efforts to utilize advanced networking technologies to contain the global COVID-19 health crisis and to prepare humanity to face similar challenges in future. This FT is an opportunity to engage scholars, researchers, experts, and professionals from academia, industry, governments into this topic to share their ideas, work, and findings in network-based technologies, protocols, and applications to combat the COVID-19 outbreak and similar ones. Submissions of interest in this FT include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel platforms for contact detection and tracing, and related analytics
• Contact/proximity tracing and privacy issues
• Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
• Internet of Things (IoT) for remote monitoring of patients
• Big data and network analytics for combating pandemics
• Edge-computing aided Social IoT
• Energy-efficient networks for smart health care
• Epidemical modeling and prediction
• Federated multimodal learning from interactive Social IoT
• Technologies to combat Social infodemic (e.g., misinformation, conspiracy theories and scams)
• eHealth and patient monitoring

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “July 2021/COVID-19” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 January 2021, 4:00 pm US Eastern time
Decision Notification: 1 April 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 15 May 2021
Publication Date: July 2021

Guest Editors

Anna Maria Vegni
Roma Tre University, Italy

Valeria Loscrì
INRIA, France

Francesco Restuccia
Northeastern University, USA

De-Nian Yang
Academia Sinica, Taiwan