Social distancing plays a pivotal role in preventing the spread of viral diseases illnesses such as COVID-19. By minimizing the close physical contact among people, we can reduce the chances of catching the virus and spreading it across the community. This two-part paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on how emerging technologies, e.g., wireless and networking, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable, encourage, and even enforce social distancing practice. In this Part I, we provide a comprehensive background of social distancing including basic concepts, measurements, models, and propose various practical social distancing scenarios. We then discuss enabling wireless technologies which are especially effective and can be widely adopted in practice to keep distance, encourage, and enforce social distancing in general. These technologies open many new solutions and directions to deal with problems in social distancing, e.g., symptom prediction, detection and monitoring quarantined people, and contact tracing. The companion paper Part II [1] surveys other emerging and related technologies, such as machine learning, computer vision, thermal, ultrasound, etc., and discusses open issues and challenges (e.g., privacypreserving, scheduling, and incentive mechanisms) in implementing social distancing in practice.

This two-part paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on how emerging technologies, e.g., wireless and networking, artificial intelligence (AI) can enable, encourage, and even enforce social distancing practice. In Part I [1], an extensive background of social distancing is provided, and enabling wireless technologies are thoroughly surveyed. In this Part II, emerging technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, thermal, ultrasound, etc., are introduced. These technologies open many new solutions and directions to deal with problems in social distancing, e.g., symptom prediction, detection and monitoring quarantined people, and contact tracing. Finally, we discuss open issues and challenges (e.g., privacy-preserving, scheduling, and incentive mechanisms) in implementing social distancing in practice. As an example, instead of reacting with ad-hoc responses to COVID-19-like pandemics in the future, smart infrastructures (e.g., next-generation wireless systems like 6G, smart home/building, smart city, intelligent transportation systems) should incorporate a pandemic mode in their standard architectures/designs.

In this paper, we propose novel approaches using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, aiming at predicting energy demand for electric vehicle (EV) networks. These methods can learn and find the correlation of complex hidden features to improve the prediction accuracy. First, we propose an energy demand learning (EDL)-based prediction solution in which a charging station provider (CSP) gathers information from all charging stations (CSs) and then performs the EDL algorithm to predict the energy demand for the considered area. However, this approach requires frequent data sharing between the CSs and the CSP, thereby driving communication overhead and privacy issues for the EVs and CSs. To address this problem, we propose a federated energy demand learning (FEDL) approach which allows the CSs sharing their information without revealing real datasets. Specifically, the CSs only need to send their trained models to the CSP for processing. In this case, we can significantly reduce the communication overhead and effectively protect data privacy for the EV users. To further improve the effectiveness of the FEDL, we then introduce a novel clustering-based EDL approach for EV networks by grouping the CSs into clusters before applying the EDL algorithms. Through experimental results, we show that our proposed approaches can improve the accuracy of energy demand prediction up to 24.63% and decrease communication overhead by 83.4% compared with other baseline machine learning algorithms.