The era of high-speed communication based on technologies such as 5G, Bluetooth 5.0, and standard-based low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) protocols, reached maturity. From the perspective of system designs, it is crucial to ensure the reliability, adaptivity, and ubiquity of the network. The applications and services of the network also require the security of data handling.

Therefore, the novel design of hardware and software architectures, as well as their integration, will become active topics worth exploring. What kind of software technology should be used in these communication sectors? How we can advance the related research and development of algorithms, middleware, operating systems, software engineering, etc.? Furthermore, application developers are also interested in the next-generation mobile network systems aiming to provide unprecedented networking capability and speed to different users. Discussions from different sectors are welcomed to explore how we should use the next generation communication. How should we effectively apply and benefit from the technologies and make them intelligently interoperate together? How will they be beneficial to society when they are applied to applications such as intelligent environments, autonomous driving, and intelligent manufacturing? In addition, with the advancement of machine learning, holistic approaches have been attempted to achieve near or optimal solutions for next-generation communication systems, which brings new opportunities for encoding and decoding, clustering, localization, mobile crowdsensing, edge computing, and security both in academia and industry. With the developments in data-driven methods, the optimization problem of the next-generation communication network in data, energy, and coding may become increasingly critical.

The scope of this Special Issue includes the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of middleware, operating systems, and applications related to the security and adaptivity issues in computing and communications in mobile wireless systems. Original research and review articles are welcome.

This Conference Issue is being run in partnership with the 2021 EAI international conference series on Mobile Wireless Middleware, Operating Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE 2021), held online and in Hohhot, China, from 6th – 8th August (https://mobilware.eai-conferences.org/2021/). Whilst submissions are invited from all researchers, we particularly welcome full-length articles both from attendees and those that have submitted abstracts and posters for consideration at this conference.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Uncertain and imprecise information processing over middleware
• QoS awareness, adaptation, and fault-tolerance of mobile services
• Information security and privacy
• Mobile crowdsourcing and people-centric collaborative sensing
• Trustworthiness, security, and privacy of mobile and wireless systems
• Opportunistic, delay-tolerant, and store-carry-forward techniques for mobile and wireless networking
• Location/context-dependent support and services
• Energy-efficient applications, services, and middleware
• Mobility and handoff management
• Human-computer interface and portable 3D graphics for mobile devices
• Emerging technologies for next generation networks (e.g. new radio technology, M2M for IoT)