Cloud Computing (CC) and virtualization concepts are two advanced technologies introduced to empower distance and blended learning. Besides, they play a crucial role in equipping learners with practical skills and fostering hands-on experience to defend against cyber-attacks. Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developed countries have already embraced the promise of CC to raise educational standards. However, the pace of its adoption in developing countries has stagnated. Moreover, existing solutions in the literature are not sustainable. They either rely on on-premise infrastructure or are bound by a single cloud service provider. Consequently, they are likely prone to failures and a sudden outage. To fill this gap, this paper is a first that comprehensively addresses the above issues and introduces a federated hybrid CC system based on an extension of Apache Virtual Computing Lab (VCL). The proposed system provides an independent open-source implementation, greater configuration flexibility, and methodological improvements as compared to existing studies in the literature. In addition, it promotes the sustainability of the CC services, extensible cloud architecture, and fault tolerance. VCL is primarily focused on provisioning Virtual Laboratories (VL) for remote cybersecurity and computer networks education, with potential expansion to other domains of engineering education. In addition, this paper introduces GPT-TerminalPro, a terminal-based tool driven by OpenAI’s Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT-3.5) that provides intelligent assistance to users while performing lab tasks. To experimentally evaluate the VCL’s performance, the standard Linux tools as well as the Apache benchmark and httperf HTTP load generators are utilized. VCL has been tested with 30 users and 61 virtual user computing environments provisioning to validate the overall performance. The results are fascinating: the provisioning time including all VCL background tasks is always less than a minute and utilizes fewer computing resources while providing a better user experience. This paper will encourage the adoption of CC in low-income countries.

The coronavirus pandemic has overburdened medical institutions, forcing physicians to diagnose and treat their patients remotely. Moreover, COVID-19 has made humans more conscious about their health, resulting in the extensive purchase of IoT-enabled medical devices. The rapid boom in the market worth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) captured cyber attackers' attention. Like health, medical data is also sensitive and worth a lot on the dark web. Despite the fact that the patient's health details have not been protected appropriately, letting the trespassers exploit them. The system administrator is unable to fortify security measures due to the limited storage capacity and computation power of the resource-constrained network devices'. Although various supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been developed to identify anomalies, the primary undertaking is to explore the swift progressing malicious attacks before they deteriorate the wellness system's integrity. In this paper, a Dew-Cloud based model is designed to enable hierarchical federated learning (HFL). The proposed Dew-Cloud model provides a higher level of data privacy with greater availability of IoMT critical application(s). The hierarchical long-term memory (HLSTM) model is deployed at distributed Dew servers with a backend supported by cloud computing. Data pre-processing feature helps the proposed model achieve high training accuracy (99.31%) with minimum training loss (0.034). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed HFL-HLSTM model is superior to existing schemes in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors’ interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches.

Abstract It has been speculated that by the year 2050, technology will have progressed to the point of complete autonomy. This paper scrolls through patent pathways and intellectual developments throughout the industrial revolutions listing significant products and services that landmarked each revolution up to Industry 4.0. The patent trails and the recent IPR inputs are expected to assist readers in fast‐tracking up to speed on the bleeding edge of the current research pools while having an eagle's eye perspective on the previous developments so far. The research pools of Industry 4.0 are classified and explored. A lack of Human‐machine workforce synergy in Industry 4.0 and the nascent “customized manufacturing” concept is addressed in subsequent sections. The paper classifies two expected phases of Industry 5.0, highlighting the subdomains touted to be its focal areas. Lastly, Industry 5.0's niche research areas are checked and a suitable pathway to achieve the goals set for the sixth revolution is proposed.

Internet of Things (IoT) produces massive heterogeneous data from various applications, including digital health, smart hospitals, automated pathology labs, and so forth. IoT sensor nodes are integrated with the medical equipment to enable the health workers to monitor the patients’ health condition and appliances in real time. However, due to security vulnerabilities, an unauthorized user can access health-related information or control the IoT nodes attached to the patient’s body resulting in unprecedented outcomes. Due to wireless channels as a medium of communication, IoT poses several threats such as a denial of service attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and modification attack to the IoT networks’ security and privacy. The proposed research presents a lightweight and anonymity-preserving user authentication protocol to counter these security threats. The given scheme establishes a secure session for the legitimate user and prohibits unauthorized users from gaining access to the IoT sensor nodes. The proposed protocol uses only lightweight cryptography primitives (hash) to alleviate the node’s tiny processor burden. The proposed protocol is efficient and superior because it has low computational and communication costs than conventional protocols. The proposed scheme uses password protection to let only the legitimate user access the IoT sensor nodes to obtain the patient’s real-time health report.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has enabled the doctors to remotely diagnose the patients, control the medical equipment, and monitor the quarantined patients through their digital devices. Security is a major concern in IoMT because the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes exchange sensitive information between virtual medical facilities over the vulnerable wireless medium. Hence, the virtual facilities must be protected from adversarial threats through secure sessions. This article proposes a lightweight and physically secure mutual authentication and secret key establishment protocol that uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to enable the network devices to verify the doctor's legitimacy (user) and sensor node before establishing a session key. PUF also protects the sensor nodes deployed in an unattended and hostile environment from tampering, cloning, and side-channel attacks. The proposed protocol exhibits all the necessary security properties required to protect the IoMT networks, like authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and anonymity. The formal AVISPA and informal security analysis demonstrate its robustness against attacks like impersonation, replay, a man in the middle, etc. The proposed protocol also consumes fewer resources to operate and is safe from physical attacks, making it more suitable for IoT-enabled medical network applications.

Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest trend for next-generation computing for data analytics, particularly in predictive edge analytics for high-risk diseases like Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Deep learning learning techniques facilitate edge AI applications for enhanced, real-time handling of data. Dopamine is the cause of Parkinson’s that happens due to the interference of brain cells that produce the substance to regulate the communication of brain cells. The brain cells responsible for generating the dopamine perform adaptation, control, and movement with fluency. Parkinson’s motor symptoms appear on the loss of 60% to 80% of cells, due to the non-production of appropriate dopamine. Recent research found a close connection between the speech impairment and PD. Many researchers have developed a classification algorithm to identify the PD from speech signals. In this article, Adaptive Crow Search Algorithm (ACSA) and Deep Learning (DL)–based optimal feature selection method are introduced. The proposed model is the combination of CROW Search and Deep learning (CROWD) stack sparse autoencoder neural network. Parkinson’s dataset is taken for the experiment from the Irvine dataset repository at the University of California (UCI). In the first phase, dataset cleaning is performed to handle the missing values in the dataset. After that, the proposed ACSA algorithm is employed to find the scrunched feature vector. Furthermore, stack spare autoencoder with seven hidden layers is employed to generate the compressed feature vector. The performance of the proposed CROWD autoencoder model is compared with three feature selection approaches for six supervised classification techniques. The experiment result demonstrates that the performance of the proposed CROWD autoencoder feature selection model has outperformed the benchmarked feature selection techniques: (i) Maximum Relevance (mRMR) (ii) Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), and (iii) Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS), to classify Parkinson’s disease. This research has significance in the healthcare sector for the enhancement of classification accuracy up to 0.96%.

The vehicular adhoc network (VANET) is an emerging research topic in the intelligent transportation system that furnishes essential information to the vehicles in the network. Nearly 150 thousand people are affected by the road accidents that must be minimized, and improving safety is required in VANET. The prediction of traffic congestions plays a momentous role in minimizing accidents in roads and improving traffic management for people. However, the dynamic behavior of the vehicles in the network degrades the rendition of deep learning models in predicting the traffic congestion on roads. To overcome the congestion problem, this paper proposes a new hybrid boosted long short‐term memory ensemble (BLSTME) and convolutional neural network (CNN) model that ensemble the powerful features of CNN with BLSTME to negotiate the dynamic behavior of the vehicle and to predict the congestion in traffic effectively on roads. The CNN extracts the features from traffic images, and the proposed BLSTME trains and strengthens the weak classifiers for the prediction of congestion. The proposed model is developed using Tensor flow python libraries and are tested in real traffic scenario simulated using SUMO and OMNeT++. The extensive experimentations are carried out, and the model is measured with the performance metrics likely prediction accuracy, precision, and recall. Thus, the experimental result shows 98% of accuracy, 96% of precision, and 94% of recall. The results complies that the proposed model clobbers the other existing algorithms by furnishing 10% higher than deep learning models in terms of stability and performance.

The growth of small satellite communication devices has pushed designers to design compact size antennas. The most prized among miniature antenna choices is the microstrip patch antenna (MPA). These antennas are low cost, lightweight and need for mechanically robust construction as well as ease of installation and aerodynamic profile but have fewer capabilities. In this paper, Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization method has been utilized for performances optimization of a MPA with parasitic elements (MPA-PE) in order to get a desirable multiband antenna for X/Ku bands CubeSat applications. GAs are capable of handling a large number of design parameters and work for optimization problems that have non-differentiable or discontinuous multi-dimensional solution spaces, making them ideal for antenna optimization. As there is not a unique solution, a GA was applied using an objective function based on the return loss at the desired frequencies. Therefore, the optimized antenna has a compact size, its geometry and characteristics are compatible with all standard structures of CubeSats. This antenna is designed and simulated using the electromagnetic simulator ANSYS HFSS, and CST MWS software is used for re-simulation of the designed antenna and the results are in good agreement.