Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the hottest research fields nowadays and has attracted huge interests and research efforts from both academia and industry. IoT can connect a large number of sensors, actuators, devices, vehicles, buildings, and/or other objects to form a network where data can be collected from the physical world, exchanged and processed in the cyber world, and then fed back into the physical world through actuations. This makes IoT one of the key foundations towards the vision of smart cities, with many promising applications such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure management, manufacturing, energy management, medical and healthcare, building and home automation, and transportation.

Recently, the advances in various wireless communication protocols in technologies such as 5G, RFID, WiFi-Direct, Li-Fi, LTE, and 6LoWPAN have greatly boosted the potential capabilities of IoT and made it become more prevalent than ever, which also accelerate the further integration of IoT with emerging technologies in other areas such as sensing (e.g., wireless video sensors and wearable sensors), wireless recharging, data exchanging, and processing (e.g., cloud computing, mobile social network, crowd sourcing, and big data). Yet, how these technologies especially the corresponding wireless communication protocols can be well aligned with IoT to maximize their benefits on such performance as scalability, service quality, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness is still open to investigation and thus call for novel solutions. And the involved privacy and security issues also need to be carefully examined and addressed.

This special issue calls for high-quality and unpublished research papers on recent advances mainly in the wireless communication protocols for the IoT research field and how such advances can enable other emerging technologies to be further integrated with IoT and boost its capabilities. Contributions may present and solve open research problems, integrate novel solutions efficiently, focus on the performance evaluation, and compare with existing standards, as well as identify and address related privacy and security issues. Theoretical as well as experimental studies for typical and newly emerging IoT use cases enabled by recent advances in wireless communication protocols are encouraged. High-quality review papers are also welcomed.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Addressing and naming of wireless communication protocols in IoT
• Cognitive and machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless communication protocols for IoT
• Energy efficiency, fault tolerance, reliability, and survivability of wireless communication protocols in IoT
• Data management, network management, and QoS of wireless communication protocols in IoT
• Emerging wireless communication protocols enabled localization, mobility management, and models for IoT
• Emerging wireless communication protocols enabled cyber-physical systems and other systems in IoT
• Emerging wireless communication protocols enabled wireless video sensing, wearable sensing, and their applications of IoT
• Emerging wireless communication protocols enabled integrations of cloud computing, social networks, crowdsourcing, and big data in IoT
• Protocols for software-defined wireless communications architecture in IoT
• Wireless communication protocols in IoT industrial environments, people/human centric IoT, and other new IoT applications
• Privacy and security of wireless communication protocols in IoT