Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were initially developed for military monitoring and surveillance tasks but found several interesting applications in the civilian domain. A promising application/technology is to use drone small cells (DSCs) to expand wireless communication coverage on demand. Rapid deployment along with limited operating costs are key factors that boost the development of DSCs for both military and civilian utilizations. DSCs are rapidly deployable to provide connectivity for temporary users (e.g. attendees of festivals, sporting events, or seminars), or over disaster areas to replace damaged communication infrastructure. UAVs are battery-powered, which makes energy consumption optimization a critical issue for acceptable performance, high availability, and an economically viable DCS deployment. In this article we focus on the scheduling of beaconing periods as an efficient means of energy consumption optimization. The conducted study provides a sub-modular game perspective of the problem and investigates its structural properties. We also provide a learning algorithm that ensures convergence of the considered UAV network with its unique Nash equilibrium operating point. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical investigations to assist our claims about the energy efficiency of the strategic beaconing policy (at Nash equilibrium).

During the last years, both academicians and professional researchers attribute an interest to the future of cities. They conclude that the technological leap will influence the both architecture and infrastructure, which will give birth to the smart cities vision. This essay aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the movement towards smartness by providing a study on divers smart city definitions which depend on geographical, environmental, economical and social constraints of each city, next to presenting dimensions that let smart city a 3D concept and highlighting some smart city Models. It gives an overview of smart city characteristics: Smart Economy, Smart Environment, Smart Governance, Smart Mobility, Smart Living and Smart Human Level and shows some big pictures of the components of each paradigm and how they been illustrated. People usually moves to cities in order to fulfil their needs in job, relationships tpand enjoy the modern life, the urbanization phenomenon, climate change and resources depletion took place and addressed a significant number of Smart cities challenges were appeared in urban areas. However, thanks to ICT, Smart City provides opportunities for people to create, invent, test and experience new things in order to optimize their quality of life.

Over the last few years, the evolution of network and user handsets’ technologies, have challenged the telecom industry and the Internet ecosystem. Especially, the unprecedented progress of multimedia streaming services like YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion resulted in an impressive demand growth and a significant need of Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., high data rate, low latency/jitter, etc.). Mainly, numerous difficulties are to be considered while delivering a specific service, such as a strict QoS, human-centric features, massive number of devices, heterogeneous devices and networks, and uncontrollable environments. Thenceforth, the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) is gaining visibility, and tremendous research efforts have been spent on improving and/or delivering reliable and added-value services, at a high user experience. In this paper, we present the importance of QoE in wireless and mobile networks (4G, 5G, and beyond), by providing standard definitions and the most important measurement methods developed. Moreover, we exhibit notable enhancements and controlling approaches proposed by researchers to meet the user expectation in terms of service experience.

Cities around the world are expanding dramatically, with urban population growth reaching nearly 2.5 billion people in urban areas and road traffic growth exceeding 1.2 billion cars by 2050. The economic contribution of the transport sector represents 5% of the GDP in Europe and costs an average of US $\$ $ 482.05 billion in the United States. These figures indicate the rapid rise of industrial cities and the urgent need to move from traditional cities to smart cities. This article provides a survey of different approaches and technologies such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that leverage communication technologies to help maintain road users safe while driving, as well as support autonomous mobility through the optimization of control systems. The role of ITS is strengthened when combined with accurate artificial intelligence models that are built to optimize urban planning, analyze crowd behavior and predict traffic conditions. AI-driven ITS is becoming possible thanks to the existence of a large volume of mobility data generated by billions of users through their use of new technologies and online social media. The optimization of urban planning enhances vehicle routing capabilities and solves traffic congestion problems, as discussed in this paper. From an ecological perspective, we discuss the measures and incentives provided to foster the use of mobility systems. We also underline the role of the political will in promoting open data in the transport sector, considered as an essential ingredient for developing technological solutions necessary for cities to become healthier and more sustainable.

With the growing demand for openness, scalability, and granularity, mobile network function virtualization (NFV) has emerged as a key enabler for the most of mobile network operators. NFV decouples network functions from hardware devices. This decoupling allows network services, called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), to be hosted on commodity hardware which simplifies and enhances service deployment and management for providers, improves flexibility, and leads to efficient and scalable resource usage, and lower costs. The proper placement of VNFs in the hosting infrastructures is one of the main technical challenges. This placement significantly influences the network’s performance, reliability, and operating costs. The VNF placement is NP-Hard. Therefore, there is a need for placement methods that can cope with the complexity of the problem and find appropriate solutions in a reasonable duration. The primary purpose of this study is to provide a taxonomy of optimization techniques used to tackle the VNF placement problems. We classify the studied papers based on performance metrics, methods, algorithms, and environment. Virtualization is not limited to simply replacing physical machines with virtual machines or VNFs, but may also include micro-services, containers, and cloud-native systems. In this context, the second part of our article focuses on the placement of Containers Network Functions (CNFs) in edge/fog computing. Many issues have been considered as traffic congestion, resource utilization, energy consumption, performance degradation, etc. For each matter, various solutions are proposed through different surveys and research papers in which each one addresses the placement problem in a specific manner by suggesting single objective or multi-objective methods based on different types of algorithms such as heuristic, meta-heuristic, and machine learning algorithms.

Demographic growth in urban areas means that modern cities face challenges in ensuring a steady supply of water and electricity, smart transport, livable space, better health services, and citizens’ safety. Advances in sensing, communication, and digital technologies promise to mitigate these challenges. Hence, many smart cities have taken a new step in moving away from internal information technology (IT) infrastructure to utility-supplied IT delivered over the Internet. The benefit of this move is to manage the vast amounts of data generated by the various city systems, including water and electricity systems, the waste management system, transportation system, public space management systems, health and education systems, and many more. Furthermore, many smart city applications are time-sensitive and need to quickly analyze data to react promptly to the various events occurring in a city. The new and emerging paradigms of edge and fog computing promise to address big data storage and analysis in the field of smart cities. Here, we review existing service delivery models in smart cities and present our perspective on adopting these two emerging paradigms. We specifically describe the design of a fog-based data pipeline to address the issues of latency and network bandwidth required by time-sensitive smart city applications.