This paper presents a novel framework for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading that integrates uncertainty-aware prediction with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), addressing a critical gap in current literature. In contrast to previous works relying on deterministic forecasts, the proposed approach employs a heteroscedastic probabilistic transformer-based prediction model called Knowledge Transformer with Uncertainty (KTU) to explicitly quantify prediction uncertainty, which is essential for robust decision-making in the stochastic environment of P2P energy trading. The KTU model leverages domain-specific features and is trained with a custom loss function that ensures reliable probabilistic forecasts and confidence intervals for each prediction. Integrating these uncertainty-aware forecasts into the MARL framework enables agents to optimize trading strategies with a clear understanding of risk and variability. Experimental results show that the uncertainty-aware Deep Q-Network (DQN) reduces energy purchase costs by up to 5.7% without P2P trading and 3.2% with P2P trading, while increasing electricity sales revenue by 6.4% and 44.7%, respectively. Additionally, peak hour grid demand is reduced by 38.8% without P2P and 45.6% with P2P. These improvements are even more pronounced when P2P trading is enabled, highlighting the synergy between advanced forecasting and market mechanisms for resilient, economically efficient energy communities.

Abstract The intentional targeting of components in a cloud based application, in order to artificially inflate usage bills, is an issue application owners have faced for many years. This has occurred under many guises, such as: Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS), Click Fraud and even secondary effects of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. With the advent of commercial offerings of serverless computing circa 2015, a variant of the EDoS attack has emerged, termed, Denial-of-Wallet (DoW). We describe our development of a simulation tool as safe means to research these attacks as well as to generate datasets for the training of future mitigation systems to combat DoW. We believe that DoW may become increasingly prevalent as applications further utilise services based on a pay-per-invocation cost model. Given that the damage caused is purely financial, such attacks may not be disclosed as application users are not directly effected. As such, we believe that the development of an attack simulator and specific testing of security measures against this niche attack will be able to provide previously unavailable data and insights for the research community. We have developed a prototype DoW simulator that can emulate multiple months worth of API calls in a matter of hours for ease of training data generation. Our aspiration for the future of this work is to provide a system and starting point for research on this form of attack. We present our work on such a system Denial-of-Wallet Test Simulator (DoWTS) - a system that allows for safe testing of theorised DoW attacks against serverless applications via synthetic data generation. We also expand upon prior research on DoW and provide an analysis on the lack of specific safety measures for DoW.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) provide the basic infrastructure for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), as it allows vehicles to access the Internet and to communicate intra-vehicle, inter-vehicle and vehicle to the roadside base station. The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an evolution of VANETs following the IoT paradigm. Nowadays, the spectrum scarcity is a big issue for the IoV networks due to the increased demand for connecting more vehicles. The cognitive radio (CR) enabled IoV networks can address this issue. In this paper, we propose a multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) antennas aided cluster based cooperative spectrum sensing (CB-CSS) scheme for CR enabled IoV networks. In this proposed scheme, each CR embedded vehicles (CRV) sends sensing data to the cluster head (CH) which makes a cluster decision by using the soft data fusion rule like the equal gain combining (EGC) fusion rule and the maximal ratio combining (MRC) fusion rule; whereas the fusion centre (FC) makes a final global decision by using the K-out-of-N rule to identify the presence of the PU signal. Simulation results show that the proposed MU-MIMO antennas aided CB-CSS scheme achieves a better sensing gain, enhanced the sum rate and lower global error probability when compared to both the conventional single-input and single-output (SISO) antenna based cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) and non-cooperative spectrum sensing (NCSS) schemes. In addition, the proposed scheme achieves a lower traffic overhead when compared to the MU-MIMO based CSS scheme without the cluster.

Serverless computing is the latest paradigm in cloud computing, offering a framework for the development of event driven, pay-as-you-go functions in a highly scalable environment. While these traits offer a powerful new development paradigm, they have also given rise to a new form of cyber-attack known as Denial of Wallet (forced financial exhaustion). In this work, we define and identify the threat of Denial of Wallet and its potential attack patterns. Also, we demonstrate how this new form of attack can potentially circumvent existing mitigation systems developed for a similar style of attack, Denial of Service. Our goal is twofold. Firstly, we will provide a concise and informative overview of this emerging attack paradigm. Secondly, we propose this paper as a starting point to enable researchers and service providers to create effective mitigation strategies. We include some simulated experiments to highlight the potential financial damage that such attacks can cause and the creation of an isolated test bed for continued safe research on these attacks.

Serverless computing offers an event driven pay-as-you-go framework for application development. A key selling point is the concept of no back-end server management, allowing developers to focus on application functionality. This is achieved through severe abstraction of the underlying architecture the functions run on. We examine the underlying architecture and report on the performance of serverless functions and how they are effected by certain factors such as memory allocation and interference caused by load induced by other users on the platform. Specifically, we focus on the serverless offerings of the four largest platforms; AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions and IBM Cloud Functions. In this paper, we observe and contrast between these platforms in their approach to the common issue of “cold starts”, we devise a means to unveil the underlying architecture serverless functions execute on and we investigate the effects of interference from load on the platform over the time span of one month.

State-of-the-art energy detection (ED) based spectrum sensing requires perfect knowledge of noise power and is vulnerable to noise uncertainty. An eigenvalue-based spectrum sensing approach performs well in such an uncertain environment, but does not mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem, which evolves with the future Internet of Things (IoT) rollout. In this paper, we propose a multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) based cognitive radio scheme for the Internet of Things (CR-IoT) with weighted-eigenvalue detection (WEVD) for the analysis of sensing, system throughput, energy efficiency and expected lifetime. In this scheme, each CR-IoT user is being equipped with MIMO antennas; we calculate the WEVD ratio, which is defined as the ratio between the difference of the maximum eigenvalue and minimum eigenvalue to the sum of the maximum eigenvalue and minimum eigenvalue. This mitigates against the spectrum scarcity problem, enhances system throughput, improves energy efficiency, prolongs expected lifetime and lowers error probability. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme; here the WEVD technique demonstrates a better detection gain and enhanced system throughput in comparison to the conventional scheme with eigenvalue based detection (EVD) and ED techniques in a noise uncertainty environment (i.e. SNR < -28). Furthermore, the proposed scheme has a lower energy consumption, prolonged expected lifetime and achieves a low error probability when compared with other schemes like the conventional single-input and single-output (SISO) based CR-IoT scheme with EVD and ED spectrum sensing.

DDoS attacks remain one of the top cyber threats targeting the financial, health care, retail, gaming, and political sectors, which affects Internet service disruption, data or monetary loss. Security experts have predicted that the development of 5G technology will increase the frequency and the vector of DDoS attacks. Moreover, enhanced DDoS attack technology utilises artificial intelligence [1], which will escalate the level of difficulty to identify malicious traffic correctly to mitigate the attack effectively. The Internet service provider (ISP) is the connector between the users and the Internet. Deploying DDoS mitigation systems within the ISP domain can offer an efficient solution. Therefore, we propose a dynamic learning system (DLS) for the ISP. The DLS is an unsupervised ensemble model using the Complete Autoencoder (CA) as base learners to classify network traffic. The utmost difference between the CA and the regular Autoencoder is that the CA exploits the imbalanced characteristic of the attack data to generate a binary classification via a class switch. When the predicted number of normal IP addresses is over 50% of the total IP addresses, the CA swaps the class of the IP addresses. The CA is directed by a reference object (RO), which is either a reference limit or the mean of a reference error function (RL1¯), to furnish the automation to the DLS. The DLS was trained with a TCP-ICMP flood attack and tested with a UDP-TCP and a UDP-TCP-ICMP flood attack data set. The average Recall, Precision and F1 Score are all above 0.97. Additionally, the DLS outperformed the K-means and the Self-Organising Map models on a UDP flood attack data set.

Summary One of the major challenges facing cloud computing is to accurately predict future resource usage to provision data centers for future demands. Cloud resources are constantly in a state of flux, making it difficult for forecasting algorithms to produce accurate predictions for short times scales (ie, 5 minutes to 1 hour). This motivates the research presented in this paper, which compares nonlinear and linear forecasting methods with a sequence prediction algorithm known as a recurrent neural network to predict CPU utilization and network bandwidth usage for live migration. Experimental results demonstrate that a multitime‐ahead prediction algorithm reduces bandwidth consumption during critical times and improves overall efficiency of a data center.

Solving a finite Markov decision process using techniques from dynamic programming such as value or policy iteration require a complete model of the environmental dynamics. The distribution of rewards, transition probabilities, states and actions all need to be fully observable, discrete and complete. For many problem domains, a complete model containing a full representation of the environmental dynamics may not be readily available. Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL)\ is a technique devised to make better use of the information observed through learning than simply computing Q-functions. However, this approach can often require extensive experience in order to build up an accurate representation of the true values. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method for parallelising a Bayesian RL technique aimed at reducing the time it takes to approximate the missing model. We demonstrate the technique on learning next state transition probabilities without prior knowledge. The approach is general enough for approximating any probabilistically driven component of the model. The solution involves multiple learning agents learning in parallel on the same task. Agents share probability density estimates amongst each other in an effort to speed up convergence to the true values.

SUMMARY Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds such as Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace deliver computational resources by means of virtualisation technologies. These technologies allow multiple independent virtual machines to reside in apparent isolation on the same physical host. Dynamically scaling applications running on IaaS clouds can lead to varied and unpredictable results because of the performance interference effects associated with co‐located virtual machines. Determining appropriate scaling policies in a dynamic non‐stationary environment is non‐trivial. One principle advantage exhibited by IaaS clouds over their traditional hosting counterparts is the ability to scale resources on‐demand. However, a problem arises concerning resource allocation as to which resources should be added and removed when the underlying performance of the resource is in a constant state of flux. Decision theoretic frameworks such as Markov Decision Processes are particularly suited to decision making under uncertainty. By applying a temporal difference, reinforcement learning algorithm known as Q‐learning, optimal scaling policies can be determined. Additionally, reinforcement learning techniques typically suffer from curse of dimensionality problems, where the state space grows exponentially with each additional state variable. To address this challenge, we also present a novel parallel Q‐learning approach aimed at reducing the time taken to determine optimal policies whilst learning online. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.