Guest editorial for the PMC special section on selected papers from ICDCN 2017

The special section includes three extended versions of selected papers from the 18th edition of the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN), held in Hyderabad, India during January 4–7, 2017. These three articles are the result of the full and regular reviewing process of a selected set of ICDCN’17 papers that were invited for possible fast-track publication in Pervasive and Mobile Computing based on strong positive reviews from the reviewers and their relevance to the journal. During the process, the papers have undergone substantial changes from the conference version, with additional technical details and results, and towards addressing the suggestions by the reviewers and guest editors of the journal special section. We believe this revision process has substantially improved the completeness and the quality of these works. We believe that these selected papers will interest a sizable section of the readers of this journal, by providing a fresh and up-to-date overview of some recent research results about reliability and emerging applications of mobile pervasive computing systems, from different layers (middleware and application perspectives) and from different international viewpoints. Below, we briefly outline how they advance the state-of-the-art in topics that fall in the scope of this journal.