The increasing availability of smart objects will radically change our cities. It is in fact a common opinion that, in the near future, our cities will be populated by a potentially higher number of devices that actively participate to the execution of pervasive and advanced services. Being massively distributed into the environment, such devices may generate, collect, exchange and process big data, provide distributed services, offer computational resources, and cooperate to perform some tasks locally, as well as to delegate the their execution to more powerful nodes in the infrastructure or at the network edge.

At the same time, end-user mobile devices are becoming more and more pervasive. In many countries, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions greatly overcomes the current population . Furthermore today’s smartphones/devices are provided with increasing sensing/communication/computation capabilities and they are capable to produce fine-grained context-information by properly analysing/mining the data produced by embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, etc.

In this futuristic scenario the citizens with their smartphones, tablets and portable devices, will assume the very special role of information prosumers (PROducers and conSUMERS). In fact, they will be constantly connected with whatever surroundings them and they will be formidable information consumers. At the same time, citizens roaming around the city may be considered as mobile probes that, by making uses of cyber and physical data accessible by smartphones, will analyze the situation and will produce reports to the community. Furthermore the citizen’s smartphones will actively contribute in creating the communication infrastructure by forwarding data coming from surrounding devices thus partially relieving the communication infrastructure from the heavy burden of the huge amount of data produced in the envisioned scenario.

All in all, cities are going to become a new complex ecosystem which has the potentiality to offer many amazing features and support innovative application. Unfortunately, fully exploiting, managing and accessing that ecosystem are still far to be fully viable and their fulfillment surely poses a formidable challenge.

The CoWPER workshop aims to solicit contributions on novel algorithms, methodological studies and experimentations on how to enable the formerly described ecosystem. Specifically, on how devise a city-wide networking infrastructure capable to efficiently guarantee communication in the new envisaged ecosystem, to manage the complexity of heterogeneous devices and access technologies, and to guarantee robust, ubiquitous, and secure connectivity over the urban environments.