The recent years have witnessed tremendous advancements in wireless communication and mobile computing technologies, with potential smart city applications such as smart parking, smart waste management, smart street lighting, smart water management, smart surveillance, and smart buildings. In order to maximize the benefits of wireless mobile applications for smart city concepts, performance optimization of these applications is of great importance. Energy-efficiency, cost-effectiveness, communication delay, quality-of-service, and quality-of-experience are some important factors to consider in optimization tasks.

Over the past years, the algorithm research community has constantly made a number of notable progresses in optimization techniques. However, applying these new techniques to optimize emerging applications requires significant additional efforts due to the unique characteristics of the emerging wireless mobile applications for smart cities.

This special issue welcomes original research and review articles on optimization problems and algorithmic solutions in emerging wireless mobile applications for smart cities. We highly encourage the submission of theoretical research articles with a particular focus on discrete optimization methods and their use for wireless mobile applications for smart cities.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mobile fog/cloud and optimization techniques for smart city applications
• Internet of Things (IoT) and optimization techniques
• Wireless and mobile sensing systems and optimization techniques
• Connected cars, intelligent transportation systems, and corresponding optimization techniques
• Optimization in data-intensive mobile computing
• Optimization in smart grid communication networks
• Optimization in the collaboration of government and utilities
• Optimization in smarter mobile healthcare
• Gathering, aggregating, and analyzing big data
• Optimization of connected intersections and smarter transit
• Optimization of public safety systems