Guest Editorial: Introduction to Special Section on Smart Systems and Intelligent Networking Powered with Big Data Analytics

The papers in this special section focus on smart systems and intelligent networking that is powered with Big Data analytics. Smart systems, including Internet of Things (IoT), have emerged to address contemporary economic, societal, and environmental challenges, such as business and production automation, urban sustainability, climate change, healthcare, and globalization. They encompass different autonomous or collaborative systems with functions of sensing, actuation, and control for describing and analyzing a situation, and make decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner. Intelligent networking enables these functions of smart systems by offering a global infrastructure for networked physical devices and everyday objects, which generates a gigantic amount of data, or big data. In addition, big data analytics is also employed in analyzing the big data so as to enable the networking to be intelligent and allow smart systems to perform astute, autonomous or collaborative actions. Nevertheless, the efficient and effective big data management and knowledge discovery of large-scale smart systems, big data analytics for intelligent networking, and networking technologies for big data (e.g., collection, processing, analysis and visualization) need more explorations.