The \(15\)th Edition of the closed-door Strategic Workshop was held in Marbella, Spain from the \(21\)st to the \(23\)rd of May, 2013. The focus during the active two-day discussions of the participating major stakeholders, was on Intelligent Infrastructure.

The theme for the Strategic Workshop 2013 (SW’13) was Intelligent Infrastructure: Technology Innovations for Capitalizing on Efficient Critical Infrastructures. Continuous advances in information and communication technology (ICT) provide enormous benefits, services, and opportunities for maximizing the efficiency of existing critical infrastructures. Research and innovation contribute to the prosperity of the society, both for its economy and the individual. Modern infrastructures are large-scale, complex and highly networked systems, whose efficiency, sustainability and protection requires intelligent, interoperable and secure ICT solutions and novel business models. The Intelligent Infrastructure is about capturing data, analysing it to seek out efficiencies, and invoking an autonomic response to instantly capture those efficiencies.

This Special Issue features nine selected papers on the above topic that concentrate on a wide range of problems in the way infrastructures are functioning today and discusses novel advanced, and intelligent methods and tools for the operation and control of existing and future infrastructures including key technologies for standardization.

The first paper, “Infrastructure for Intelligent Automation Services in the Smart Grid”, by Rune Hylsberg and Søren Aagard Mikkelsen defines a system architecture that provides interoperability between wireless sensors in Home Area networks (HAN) connected over the Internet to a service provider function deployed in a cloud infrastructure.

The second paper, “Smart Cities via Data Aggregation”, by Javier Poncela, Panagiotis Vlacheas, Raffaele Giaffreda, Suparna De, Massimo Vecchio, Septimiu Nechifor, Raquel Barco, Mari Carmen Aguayo-Torres, Vera Stavroulaki, Klaus Moessner, and Panagiotis Demestichas presents a resilient, adaptive and social sensing platform for smart cities, in order to address the pressing need for on-time and dependable delivery of data/data-streams in innovative “city-sensing”-driven applications.

The third paper, “Coping With Network Dynamics Using Reinforcement Learning Based Network Optimization In Wireless Networks”, by Milos Rovcanin, Eli de Poorter, Ingrid Moerman, and Piet Demester investigates the inherent trade-offs that occur when using reinforcement learning techniques in dynamic networks: the need to keep the network running optimally at the same time whilst at the same time different (suboptimal) network settings need to be continuously investigated to cope with changing network conditions.

The fourth paper, “E-BEB: Enhanced Binary Exponential Backoff Algorithm for Multi-hop Wireless Ad-hoc Networks”, by Hui-Hsin Chin, Chun-Cheng Lin, and Der-Juinn Deng proposes simple, efficient, priority provision, and well performed contention resolution algorithm called Enhanced Binary Exponential Backoff (E-BEB) algorithm for impartial channel access in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks.

The fifth paper, “Hierarchical Architecture for Multi-Technology Wireless Sensor networks for Critical Infrastructure Protection”, by Heikke Karvonen, Jukka Suhonen, Juha Petäjäjärvi, Matti Hämäläinen, Marko Hännikäinen, and Ari Pouttu defines hierarchical wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture and a WSN Open API Gateway (WOAG) that address the convergence and cooperation of heterogeneous sensor network devices.

The sixth paper, “CloudThinking as an Intelligent Infrastructure for Mobile Robotics”, by Rui L. Aguiar, Diogo Gomes, João Paulo Barraca, and Nuno Lau presents the CloudThinking architecture applied for intelligent cloud-based robotic operation.

The seventh paper, “Indoor Radio Propagation and Interference in 2.4 GHz Wireless Sensor Networks”, by Dragos Mihai Amzucu, Hong R. Li, and Erik Fledderus focuses only on indoor deployments, i.e. in office buildings, for applications such as energy management, lighting control, or fire alarm systems.

The eighth paper, “Need For Broadband Infrastructure In A 2020 Perspective”, by Knud Erik Skouby, Morten Falch, Anders Henten, and Reza Tadayoni discusses the needs for broadband access up until 2020 by scrutinizing the different services and applications requiring bandwidth. The bandwidth requirements in question are those of residential users and SMEs. Many larger companies require substantial bandwidths and subscribe to connections of very high speeds. However, the focus here is on the vast majority of users, namely households and SMEs.

The ninth paper, “The Sensing Business Model”, by Peter Lindgren shows different levels and attempt of sensing business models and shows these in reference of a definition and framework of a sensing business model (BM). 5 different businesses–working with different sensing BM’s and sensor technology—are presented. The use cases show combination of biological and mechanical sensors together with physical and digital sensors. In combination the sensoring BM could lead businesses into a new area of business modeling.