IEEE PerCom, now in its 24th year, will be held in Pisa, Italy in March 2026 as an in-person physical event.

PerCom is the premier annual scholarly venue in pervasive computing and communications. Pervasive computing is at the forefront of mobile systems research, and has found its way into many commercial applications due to tremendous advances in a broad spectrum of technologies and topics such as wireless networking, mobile and distributed computing, sensor systems, ambient intelligence, and smart devices.

Scope

PerCom 2026 solicits research contributions in all areas pertinent to pervasive computing and communications, especially those that cross traditional research boundaries. In particular, PerCom targets contributions in:

    Advances in pervasive systems and infrastructures: middleware systems and services; data engineering for pervasive computing; cloud, fog and edge computing; integrations of smartphones in pervasive experiences; applications of device-to-device coordination.
    Theories, models, and algorithms: context modeling & reasoning; adaptive computing; activity & emotion recognition; programming paradigms; applied deep/federated/decentralized machine learning; causal learning; cognitive computing; complex networks; spatio-temporal modeling.
    Domain-specific challenges and novel applications: urban/mobile crowdsensing & intelligence; PerCom for healthcare and well-being; cyber-physical systems; PerCom for space applications, smart homes and virtual assistants; mixed reality; sports analytics; crime prevention; pervasive nowcasting; urban robotics; pervasive AR/VR; smart vehicles; disaster sensing and management.
    Intersections of PerCom with: IoT and sensor systems; Large Language Models; opportunistic networks; pervasive data science; cyber-physical systems; 3D networks.
    Enablers for PerCom instrumentation: security, privacy and trust in Pervasive Computing; ethical aspects of Pervasive Computing.
    New techniques for user-level concerns: participatory and social sensing; fairness and ethics; user interface, interaction, and persuasion; online and offline social networking; human-machine collaboration.
    Technological innovations: architectures, protocols, and technologies for pervasive communications; energy-harvesting, self-powered, or battery-less systems; mobile and wearable systems; smart devices and environments; positioning, navigation, timing, and tracking technologies; device-free human sensing.

Contributions can be analytical, empirical, technological, methodological, or a combination thereof. Papers reporting strong systems engineering contributions backed by solid and appropriate evaluations are strongly encouraged.

Contributions should be novel (those presenting only minor improvements over the state of the art will not be considered), should demonstrate a significant impact (i.e., they should address an outstanding problem), and should be rigorous.

Note that the impact of the contributions should be demonstrated in the context of pervasive computing and communications applications.