With the rapid development of wireless communication techniques, an ever-increasing amount of users are accessing the smart grid networks, while facing new challenges in security. This is not only harmful to the individual's interests but also brings severe damage to the public information infrastructure. Currently, system resources of smart grid networks are becoming scarce, which is the bottleneck of the development of communication and security of the system. By equipping buffer and cache into the nodes of the smart grid networks, a new dimension of communication resource can be introduced through caching space. Caching provides a great potential in enhancing the communication quality and security for the wireless smart grid networks, which has become a hot research topic in recent studies of wireless communications.

However, several major challenges still exist in the field of intelligent caching-aided communication and security of smart grid networks. One major challenge is the complicated performance analysis, due to the integration of caching and communication. Hence, an intelligent performance analysis approach should be developed to reveal the inherent mechanism between caching and communication. One more challenge is the intelligent system design, which should jointly incorporate the system caching strategy and communication techniques in an intelligent approach. Another challenge is the intelligent resource management of caching and communication, where some intelligent algorithms should be proposed to deeply exploit the potential of caching in enhancing the communication and security of the wireless smart grid networks.

To address these major challenges, this Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of intelligent caching-aided communication and security for smart grid networks. This Special Issue will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and governmental agencies to promote the research and development that pertain to this cutting-edge research topic. We welcome original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Intelligent caching strategy for communication
• Privacy-oriented caching strategy
• Joint design of caching and communication
• Performance analysis for intelligent caching strategy
• Intelligent transmission schemes for caching-aided communication systems
• Advanced resource management for caching-aided smart grid networks
• File popularity analysis and prediction
• Deep learning and federated learning
• Smart grid networks
• Industrial Internet of Things
• Caching with massive MIMO
• Practical implementation of caching-aided smart grid networks