In today’s society, the Internet of Things (IoT) brings ubiquitous connectivity to everyone’s everyday lives, while optical wireless communications provide unlicensed broadband spectrum and ultra-high-speed data transmission. Smart vehicles offer high mobility for intelligent networks, while electromagnetic energy in air, such as the radio frequency (RF) wave, helps power IoT terminals and sensors wirelessly.

What will happen when wireless IoT meets optics, autonomous vehicles, or energy harvesting, as well as when associated mobility, smart control, extreme environment, and sustainability issues are involved? Demands on diverse wireless technologies and methods have been raised in complicated IoT communication environments, leading to recent developments in optical wireless communications, magnetic induction communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). The integration of these emerging wireless technologies can provide a high freedom of connectivity in communications to enable the future generation of IoT.

The aim of this Special Issue is to cover state-of-the-art research areas in emerging wireless technologies and to discuss the benefits and challenges that accompany the integration of heterogeneous communications in IoT applications. We invite topics which include visible light communication (VLC)-based smart buildings, connected-vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, SWIPT for optic wireless/RF hybrid IoT, autonomous UAV or machine-to-machine (M2M) assisted IoT industry, machine learning and energy harvesting for energy efficient IoT applications. Submissions are encouraged to explore both theory and application while considering practical aspects by ways of simulation, semi-simulation and/or lab-experiments that can demonstrate the advancement of a proposed work. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Visible light communication (VLC), and optical/RF hybrid IoT systems
• Distributed sensing, V2X and UAV assisted intelligent IoT
• Optical wireless, magnetic induction, backscatter communications in smart city
• Building automation and high-performance servo tracking control
• Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications
• Massive machine-type communications (mMTC)
• Signal processing and localization in extreme environments for IoT
• Integrated mobile cloud/edge computing, and machine learning methods for intelligent IoT communications
• Heterogeneous SWIPT enabled future IoT with RF, infrared, and VLC