Call for Papers

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Inspired by Shannon’s classic information theory, the design of a communications system or architecture mainly involves three different levels of problems, namely, (i) transmission of symbols (the technical problem); (ii) semantic exchange of transmitted symbols (the semantic problem); (iii) effect of semantic information exchange (the effectiveness problem). The first level of communication, which is the transmission of symbols, has been well studied and realized in conventional communication systems based on Shannon’s bit-oriented technical framework. Recently, with the development of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including Extended Reality (XR)-aided teleoperation equipment in Industrial IoT, Internet of BioNanoThings (IoBNT) in Healthcare IoT, autonomous vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Automotive IoT, etc., diverse tasks with stringent requirements pose critical challenges to traditional bit-oriented communications, which are already approaching the Shannon physical capacity limit. This will push revolutionary solutions at the IoT technology, system, and architecture levels with the native adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to scale up performance as well as save energy and resources.

Recent initial works of the second level on “semantic communications” have mainly focused on identifying the content of the traditional text and speech and the information freshness, i.e., Age of Information (AoI), as a semantic metric that captures the timeliness of the information. However, these cannot capture the IoT data importance sufficiently for achieving a specific IoT task, such as speech recognition tasks, emerging image processing tasks, robotic control tasks, XR-aided teleoperation tasks, etc. These task-oriented communications need to define new metrics to characterize the third effectiveness level performance for specific tasks. Nowadays vision of the network is an enabler of pervasive intelligent services, with a strong emphasis on its effectiveness for the third level. However, an explicit and systematic communication framework, incorporating both semantic level and effectiveness level, has not been proposed yet.

To address this challenge, this Special Issue (SI) is aimed to invite researchers from academia and industry to scope the latest research opportunities on new architecture, frameworks, and protocols for task-oriented communications and networking toward 6G IoT. An outline of topics on which we plan to solicit submissions is as follows:

• New Architecture and protocols for task-oriented communications for IoT 
• Information theory for task-oriented communications for IoT
• Communication theory for task-oriented communications for IoT
• Signal processing for task-oriented communications for IoT
• Task-oriented communications for edge learning in IoT
• Task-oriented communications for aerial/ground robotic control in IoT
• Task-oriented communications for extended reality in IoT 
• Task-oriented communications for distributed learning in IoT 
• Task-oriented communications for text and speech in IoT 
• Task-oriented communications for Integrated sensing and communication in IoT 
• Privacy and security issues of task-oriented communications for IoT
• Experiments and testbeds of task-oriented communications for IoT

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the IEEE Internet of Things Magazine standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Article Submission Guidelines. All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through the magazine’s Manuscript Central site. Select “September 2023 / Task-Oriented Communications and Networking for the Internet of Things (IoT)” from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 30 June 2023 (Extended Deadline)
Authors’ Revision Notification Date: 1 June 2023
Revised Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 July 2023
Final Decision Notification Date: 15 August 2023
Camera-ready Files Due: 30 August 2023
Guest Editorial/Column: 15 September 2023
Expected Publication Date: December 2023

Lead Guest Editor

Yansha Deng
King’s College London, UK

Guest Editors

Yan Liu (Secondary Corresponding GE)
Tongji University, China

Nikolaos Pappas
Linköping University, Sweden

Jun Zhang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

Yue Wang
Samsung Electronics, UK

Kathiravetpillai Sivanesan
Intel, USA