Call For Papers: Special Issue on Revisiting Mobility

IEEE Pervasive Computing seeks submissions for this upcoming special issue.

Important Dates

Call for Papers

Mobility is undergoing a profound transformation. Advances in sensing, connectivity, distributed intelligence, and automation are reshaping how people, goods, and services move through physical environments. From connected vehicles and autonomous drones to intelligent transport infrastructure and multimodal urban mobility platforms, transportation systems are becoming deeply intertwined with pervasive computing technologies.

Today’s mobility ecosystems are no longer confined to isolated vehicles or static infrastructure. They are dynamic, data-rich, and context-aware environments where embedded intelligence supports real-time decision-making, adaptive routing, cooperative perception, and human–machine collaboration. Edge computing, sensor fusion, and AI-driven analytics are enabling vehicles and transport systems to operate with increasing autonomy, safety, and efficiency.

At the same time, revisiting mobility through a pervasive computing lens raises fundamental challenges. Transport systems must operate under stringent constraints—low latency, high reliability, safety certification, cybersecurity resilience, and regulatory compliance—often in highly dynamic and adversarial conditions. The integration of pervasive intelligence into vehicles, drones, and infrastructure demands new architectures, verification frameworks, and interaction paradigms.

This Special Issue invites contributions that critically examine the evolution of mobility systems through pervasive computing. We seek both technical innovations and reflective analyses that explore how distributed sensing, data-driven intelligence, and embedded computation are redefining transport across land, air, and urban spaces.

We invite original and high-quality submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Sensing and Context-Awareness in Mobility Systems — real-time perception, multimodal sensing, cooperative awareness, traffic context modelling, environmental intelligence.
  • Mobility data collection and fusion: Multi-source multi-granularity mobility data generated by different sensors like GNSS, WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRA; or from different transportation modes like bus, subway, bike.
  • Edge Intelligence and Real-Time Decision Making — on-device AI, low-latency inference, adaptive routing, distributed learning, bandwidth-constrained optimisation.
  • Distributed and Cooperative Mobility Systems — V2X communication, swarm coordination, fleet intelligence, collaborative perception, infrastructure–vehicle integration.
  • Safety, Reliability, and Resilience — fault tolerance, safety certification, cybersecurity, adversarial robustness, real-time dependability.
  • Human–Machine Interaction in Transport — shared autonomy, multimodal interfaces, situational awareness, trust calibration, human oversight.
  • Data, Machine Intelligence, and Mobility Platforms — mobility data analytics, foundation models, federated learning, predictive modelling, privacy-preserving AI.
  • Sustainability and Societal Impact — energy-efficient transport, inclusive mobility, urban resilience, ethical autonomy, regulatory frameworks.
  • Case Studies and Real-World Deployments — smart cities, autonomous vehicles, drone ecosystems, logistics platforms, large-scale operational validation.

We also welcome papers addressing any aspect of this field, provided that the connection to pervasive computing is central and clear. Review or summary articles offering critical evaluations of the state of the art or in-depth analyses of emerging technologies will also be considered if they demonstrate academic rigor and relevance.

Articles submitted to IEEE Pervasive Computing should not exceed 6,000 words, including all text, the abstract, keywords, bibliography, biographies, and table text. The word count must include 250 words for each table and figure. References should be limited to at most 20 citations (40 for survey papers). Authors are encouraged, but not required, to use a template for submission (accepted articles will ultimately be typeset by magazine staff for publication).

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information Page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal portal. Abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Pervasive Computing, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE's data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at pvc3-2027@computer.org

IEEE Pervasive Computing always welcomes submissions into its regular queue that cover the role of computing in the physical world – as characterized by visions such as the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing. Topics of interest include hardware design, sensor networks, mobile systems, human-computer interaction, industrial design, machine learning, and data science, as well as societal issues including privacy and ethics. Please read the Author Information page before submitting. Simply select the “Regular” option when submitting at the submission site (submissions are possible at any time; no need for prior abstract by email).

Read Next