Unmanned aerial vehicles received significant attention from the research community. This increasing interest has been motivated by major advances in communication, sensing and component miniaturization fields. Although, initially envisioned for military applications, UAVs witnessed their application domains grow to cover disaster relief and emergency response, border surveillance and more recently Internet access providing, air delivery service.

For instance, Drones are a major component of a Facebook initiative announced in 2014 to provide an affordable connection from the sky for on the ground users. Also, in 2013, Amazon announced its next-generation Prime Air delivery service. Packages will be delivered to customers in less than 30 minutes using small UAVs. The past 2 years has witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of personal drones and an increasing interest in potential opportunities along with a justified concern over their misuse to breach critical infrastructure.

This special session will concentrate on the autonomous (or semi-autonomous) aerial vehicles and aims to shed light on research related to positioning optimization, security, communication and applications. Prospective authors are cordially invited to submit their original contributions covering completed or ongoing work related to the area of UAV applications.
Themes of this special session include but are not limited to:

• Delay-tolerant networking for UAV operations
• Multi-hop and device-to-device communications with UAVs
• Drone Small Cells deployment
• QoS mechanisms and performance evaluation for UAV networks
• Game-theoretic and control-theoretic mechanisms for UAV communications
• Integrating 4G and 5G wireless technologies into UAV communications, such as millimeter wave communications, beamforming, moving networks, and machine type communications
• Use of UAVs for public safety and emergency communications, networking, and positioning
• Use of civilian networks for small UAV communications
• Security and privacy issues for UAV communications
• Energy-efficient communications considering opportunistic route/position for small UAVs
• UAV-empowered Smart E-health systems
• Design of content storage and delivery methods with UAVs

Special Session Chairs:
Mohammed-Amine Koulali, National Applied Science School, Mohammed I university of Oujda, Morocco.
Fouad Moutaouakkil, Higher National School in Electricity and Mechanics, Hassan II University, Morocco.

Publications
All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings published by SPRINGER.

Important dates:
Submission Due: March 31, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2016
Camera-Ready Due: April 25, 2016

Paper Format and Submission:
Format: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0