VR/AR, 5G, and Edge Computing for Mobile Applications

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 December 2024 | Viewed by 6157

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, 6000-084 Castelo Branco, Portugal
Interests: assistive technologies; context-aware systems; mobile and ubiquitous computing; smart cities; smart spaces

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, 6000-084 Castelo Branco, Portugal
Interests: programming languages and environments; mobile app development; software engineering; agile software development

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We have witnessed the exponential growth of mobile devices and their impact on citizens and businesses. These devices have transformed the way we identify ourselves, communicate with each other, purchase products or manage our daily lives. In this context, 5G, edge computing, and AR/VR, among other technologies, have attracted considerable attention in academia and business. In recent years, they have influenced the way mobile applications are developed with an impact on the most diverse industries/sectors and verticals.

This Special Issue aims to present state-of-the-art developments in the domain of VR/AR, 5G, and Edge Computing for Mobile Applications. In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • 5G enabled mobile computing;
  • AR/VR for mobile applications;
  • Artificial intelligence at the edge;
  • Edge computing for mobile applications;
  • Edge computing in UAV networks;
  • Energy efficiency in edge computing applications;
  • Human and social-driven design of mobile edge computing;
  • IoT verticals and mobile applications;
  • Mobile and wireless networks for edge computing;
  • Mobile edge computing architectures and applications;
  • Privacy and security techniques in edge applications services;
  • Radio resource management for mobile edge computing;
  • Services and software for edge computing;
  • Software quality assurance in IoT applications;
  • Virtualization technologies for edge computing.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Fernando Reinaldo Ribeiro
Dr. José Metrôlho
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • 5G
  • edge computing
  • IoT
  • mobile applications
  • VR/AR

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (3 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

27 pages, 3601 KiB  
Article
DRL-Based Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in Green MEC-Enabled Maritime-IoT Networks
by Ze Wei, Rongxi He, Yunuo Li and Chengzhi Song
Electronics 2023, 12(24), 4967; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12244967 - 11 Dec 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1440
Abstract
The maritime Internet of Things (MIoT), a maritime version of the Internet of Things (IoT), is envisioned as a promising solution that can provide ubiquitous connectivity over land and sea. Due to the rapid development of maritime activities and the maritime economy, there [...] Read more.
The maritime Internet of Things (MIoT), a maritime version of the Internet of Things (IoT), is envisioned as a promising solution that can provide ubiquitous connectivity over land and sea. Due to the rapid development of maritime activities and the maritime economy, there is a growing demand for computing-intensive and latency-sensitive maritime applications requiring various energy consumption, communication, and computation resources, posing a significant challenge to MIoT devices due to their limited computational ability and battery capacity. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which can handle computation tasks at the network’s edge more efficiently and with less latency, is emerging as a paradigm for fulfilling the ever-increasing demands of MIoT applications. However, the exponential increase in the number of MIoT devices has increased the system’s energy consumption, resulting in increased greenhouse gas emissions and a negative impact on the environment. As a result, it is vital for MIoT networks to take traditional energy usage minimization into account. The integration of renewable energy-harvesting capabilities into base stations or MIoT devices possesses the potential to reduce grid energy consumption and carbon emissions. However, making an effective decision regarding task offloading and resource allocation is crucial for maximizing the utilization of the system’s potential resources and minimizing carbon emissions. In this paper, we first propose a green MEC-enabled maritime IoT network architecture to flexibly provide computing-intensive and latency-sensitive applications for MIoT users. Based on the architecture, we formulate the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem by optimizing the total system execution efficiency (including the total size of completed tasks, task execution latency, and the system’s carbon emissions) and then propose a deep-deterministic-policy-gradient-based joint optimization strategy to solve the problem, eventually obtaining an effective resolution through continuous action space learning in the changing environment. Finally, simulation results confirm that our proposal can yield good performance in system execution efficiency compared to other benchmarks; that is, it can significantly reduce the system’s carbon emissions and tasks’ delay and improve the total size of completed tasks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue VR/AR, 5G, and Edge Computing for Mobile Applications)
Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 978 KiB  
Article
Identification and Visualization of a Patient’s Medical Record via Mobile Devices without an Internet Connection
by Sergio Laso, Daniel Flores-Martin, Juan Luis Herrera, Jaime Galán-Jiménez and Javier Berrocal
Electronics 2023, 12(1), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12010075 - 25 Dec 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1529
Abstract
Nowadays, people’s medical records are crucial when it comes to providing treatments, discovering pathologies, or keeping track of health status. Advances in technology have allowed these records to be increasingly digitized, to the point that they can be consulted by specialists from anywhere. [...] Read more.
Nowadays, people’s medical records are crucial when it comes to providing treatments, discovering pathologies, or keeping track of health status. Advances in technology have allowed these records to be increasingly digitized, to the point that they can be consulted by specialists from anywhere. This also allows people to report their health status, allergies, or treatments. However, knowing a person’s medical history is a delicate and complex process, and accessing these digitized data is not always possible due to problems with network connectivity or physical communication with the person. In this work, we propose a solution for medical staff to obtain a patient’s medical history through facial recognition, and without the need for an internet connection. This proposal is based on the development of an architecture that allows connecting nearby mobile devices of doctors and patients without an internet connection to obtain the desired information using facial recognition as an authentication method. The architecture has been validated with the development of a mobile application that, by focusing on the patient’s face with the camera of the doctor’s mobile device, makes it possible to obtain the patient’s medical information. With this proposal, it is possible to obtain the medical history of a person in dangerous situations or where the connectivity is limited or non-existent, in a simple and fast way. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue VR/AR, 5G, and Edge Computing for Mobile Applications)
Show Figures

Figure 1

19 pages, 3420 KiB  
Article
Radio Interference of Wireless Networks and the Impact of AR/VR Applications in Industrial Environments
by Rogério Dionísio, Fernando Ribeiro and José Metrôlho
Electronics 2023, 12(1), 67; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12010067 - 24 Dec 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2190
Abstract
The use of wireless communications systems on the factory shop floor is becoming an appealing solution with many advantages compared to cable-based solutions, including low cost, easy deployment, and flexibility. This, combined with the continuous growth of low-cost mobile devices, creates opportunities to [...] Read more.
The use of wireless communications systems on the factory shop floor is becoming an appealing solution with many advantages compared to cable-based solutions, including low cost, easy deployment, and flexibility. This, combined with the continuous growth of low-cost mobile devices, creates opportunities to develop innovative and powerful applications that, in many cases, rely on computing and memory-intensive algorithms and low-latency requirements. However, as the density of connected wireless devices increases, the spectral noise density rises, and, consequently, the radio interference between radio devices increase. In this paper, we discuss how the density of AR/VR mobile applications with high throughput and low latency affect industrial environments where other wireless devices use the same frequency channel. We also discuss how the growing number of these applications may have an impact on the radio interference of wireless networks. We present an agnostic methodology to assess the radio interferences between wireless communication systems on the factory floor by using appropriate radio and system models. Several interference scenarios are simulated between commonly used radio systems: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and WirelessHART, using SEAMCAT. For a 1% probability of interference and considering a criterion of C/I = 14 dB, the simulations on an 80 m × 80 m factory shop floor show that low-bandwidth systems, such as Bluetooth and WirelessHART, can coexist with high-bandwidth and low-latency AR/VR applications running on Wi-Fi mobile terminals if the number of 11 Wi-Fi access points and 80 mobile AR/VR devices transmitting simultaneously is not exceeded. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue VR/AR, 5G, and Edge Computing for Mobile Applications)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop