As the deep integration of ubiquitous sensors, intelligent devices, and social networks, mobile networks and IoT are formed by the opportunity of virtual mobile communication networks and social communities between mobile carriers. People involved in a mobile network can easily interact and share information with each other anytime and anywhere though the popular use of intelligent devices. As a result, there is a remarkable trend to enable crowdsourcing for mobile networks and IoT to address various problems that involve real-time collection, processing, and collaborations among participants in highly mobile environments. Thus, crowdsourcing could be an efficient strategy to improve quality and user experiences of applications in mobile networks and IoT, which not only potentially brings enormous benefits for economics but also leads to revolution for our daily life. Particularly, mobile crowdsensing takes advantage of the mobile terminal’s mobility and provides context-aware services in large scale areas.

The embedded sensors including accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, GPS, microphone, and camera in mobile phones are leveraged to gather the required information to support location-based services, for example, environmental measurements, personal activity sharing, and online recommendation. Currently, a number of crowdsourcing based mobile applications have been applied in mobile networks and IoT, targeting at real time services and recommendation, for example, Uber, Elance, Amazon, and Airbnb. However, mobile crowdsourcing may face some limitations caused by the mobile devices, such as computation, memory, and energy constraints. Besides, most of them focus on the application functionalities, ignoring the users’ willingness and operationality. Therefore, feasible and efficient crowdsourcing schemes are desirable for the applications of mobile networks and IoT, such as suitable incentive scheme, appropriate task assignment, and user-friendly mobile applications. The objective of this special issue is to collect articles on the state of the art and practices of crowdsourcing for mobile networks and IoT. In particular, we are soliciting theoretical and applied research in crowdsourcing solutions for mobile networks and IoT including algorithms, modeling, technologies, and applications.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Architecture, strategies, and/or algorithms for IoT based crowdsensing
• Protocols, scheduling, and/or designs for crowdsensing mobile networking
• Privacy and security for crowdsourcing schemes in mobile networks and IoT
• Data source reliability estimation and assurance for crowdsourcing in IoT
• Incentive schemes for motivating users to participate in crowdsourcing applications
• Crowdsourced image/video processing and retrieval in mobile networks and IoT
• Crowdsourcing in secure IoT
• Plausible and user-friendly software design and implementation for crowdsourcing application
• Standards, policy, and regulation for V2X communication systems using crowdsourcing schemes
• Trust establishment and measurement for crowdsensing based IoT
• Task assignment and resource management in crowdsensing based IoT
• Novel crowdsensing applications of Internet robots and intelligent devices in IoT