In this paper, we propose a secrecy-aware energy-efficient scheme for a two-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet), consisting of a sub-6 GHz macrocell and multiple millimeter wave (mmWave) picocells. Each picocell is assumed to have several users and an eavesdropper (Eve) which intercepts the signal of the picocell users. In the proposed scheme, firstly, to maximize the secrecy energy-efficiency (SEE) of picocell users, a joint optimization problem of power control, channel allocation, and beamforming is formulated by considering the minimum secrecy rate and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Due to the non-convex nature of the aforementioned optimization problem in a highly dynamic HetNet environment, we transform it into a reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the Markov decision process (MDP). Then, a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) technique is used to obtain the maximum long-term reward. Moreover, we propose a multi-agent cooperative deep reinforcement learning (DRL) scheme known asSecBoostto solve the MDP with large number of action and state spaces. It uses the dueling and double-Q architecture of dueling double deep Q-network (D3QN) to optimize power control, channel allocation, and beamforming vectors to maximize the SEE of picocells. Also, prioritized experience replay is used to increase the sampling efficiency ofSecBoost. The SEE performance ofSecBoostis compared with MARL, multi-agent deep Q-network (MA-DQN), state-of-the-art joint beamforming based secrecy energy efficiency maximization (JBF-SEEM) scheme, and one-time pad based encrypted data transmission (O-EDT). Simulation results demonstrated that the proposedSecBoostscheme achieves 14.7%, 8.33%, 30%, and 69% better average SEE in comparison to MARL, MA-DQN, JBF-SEEM, and O-EDT schemes, respectively, which reveals its effectiveness in improving SEE of picocells.

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had a significant impact on various industries, including healthcare. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has played a vital role in this evolution. However, while AI has contributed to many benefits in healthcare, concerns about data privacy and security persist. To address these concerns, we propose a framework that combines Federated Learning (FL) and Differential Privacy (DP) to enhance data protection within IoMT. By integrating FL’s decentralized approach with DP’s mechanism to prevent data reconstruction from model outputs, we can improve data confidentiality. This integrated approach is used to develop and analyze high-performing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for detecting Tuberculosis using chest X-ray datasets. The framework undergo thorough performance evaluation, utilizing various metrics to establish its superiority over baseline models. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as a robust solution for secure and private AI applications in healthcare.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are drawing enormous attention in both commercial and military applications to facilitate dynamic wireless communications and deliver seamless connectivity due to their flexible deployment, inherent line-of-sight (LOS) air-to-ground (A2G) channels, and high mobility. These advantages, however, render UAV-enabled wireless communication systems susceptible to eavesdropping attempts. Hence, there is a strong need to protect the wireless channel through which most of the UAV-enabled applications share data with each other. There exist various error correction techniques such as Low Density Parity Check (LDPC), polar codes that provide safe and reliable data transmission by exploiting the physical layer but require high transmission power. Also, the security gap achieved by these error-correction techniques must be reduced to improve the security level. In this paper, we present deep learning (DL) enabled punctured LDPC codes to provide secure and reliable transmission of data for UAVs through the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel irrespective of the computational power and channel state information (CSI) of the Eavesdropper. Numerical result analysis shows that the proposed scheme reduces the Bit Error Rate (BER) at Bob effectively as compared to Eve and the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) per bit value of 3.5 dB is achieved at the maximum threshold value of BER. Also, the security gap is reduced by 47.22 % as compared to conventional LDPC codes.

Summary From the last few years, we have witnessed the fourth generation industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), impact of which will be seen in the years to come in various disciplines such as healthcare, transportation, IoT, smart grid, autonomous vehicles, and image processing. These applications in Industry 4.0 may have data in the form of images, speech signals, videos having high dimensions containing multiple dimensions to represent data along different axis. So, the complexity of data processing increases with an increase in the dimensions of the dataset. Complexity can be viewed in terms of detecting and exploiting the relationships among different features of the dataset. These complexities among different attributes can be reduced with the help of dimensionality reduction techniques. These techniques reduce the dimensions from the original input dataset to a lower dimensional dataset. Dimensionality reduction methods are broadly categorized into two types asfeature extraction and feature selection. In feature selection method, out of the original set, a subset of features are identified to get a smaller subset which can be used to build the model whereas, the feature extraction method reduces the dataset of high dimensions to a lower dimension space, that is, a space with a less number of features having different values in comparison to the original dataset. Keeping focus on these points, in this article, we have compared and analyzed different data dimensionality reduction techniques which reduce the dimensions of a large and complex dataset during data processing. In addition, we have discussed various data dimensionality reduction techniques and compared these techniques with respect to various parameters. The comparison among various techniques provides insights to the readers about the applicability of a specific technique to the stand‐alone or a group of applications.

People need to breathe, and so do other living beings, including plants and animals. It is impossible to overlook the impact of air pollution on nature, human well-being, and concerned countries' economies. Monitoring of air pollution and future predictions of air quality have lately displayed a vital concern. There is a need to predict the air quality index with high accuracy; on a real-time basis to prevent people from health issues caused by air pollution. With the help of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle's onboard sensors, we can collect air quality data easily. The paper proposes a distributed and decentralized Federated Learning approach within a UAV swarm. The accumulated data by the sensors are used as an input to the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model. Each UAV used its locally gathered data to train a model before transmitting the local model to the central base station. The central base station creates a master model by combining all the UAV's local model weights of the participating UAVs in the FL process and transmits it to all UAV s in the subsequent cycles. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated with other machine learning models using various evaluation metrics using test data from the capital city of India, i.e., Delhi.

As stated by Spock, “change is the essential process of all existence,” which is reflected in everyday applications in our daily lives. We, as humans, just need to find a way to make the best use of the current technological advances. The pandemic has managed to exploit our deepest vulnerabilities and insecurities. We need to cope with a lot of things, just to be comfortable in the new normal. Hence, we can rely on technology, the greatest asset developed by humans. In this article, we discuss how we can enhance the work environment in offices post-pandemic. We combine federated learning with emotion analysis to create a state-of-the-art, simple, secure, and efficient emotion monitoring system. We combine facial expression and speech signals to find out macroexpressions and create an emotion index that is monitored to find the mental health of the user. Federated learning enables users to locally train the model without compromising his/her privacy. In place of sending data to the centralized server, the proposed scheme sends only model weights that are combined at the server to make a better global model, which is further pushed back to the users. This model is then trained interorganizational as it does not violate the privacy or data sharing to achieve optimal results. The data collected from users are monitored to analyze the mental health and presented with counseling solutions during low times. Technology is a panacea that has enabled us to survive in this pandemic, and by using our solution to improve work culture and the environment in post-pandemic times.

The applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military, intelligent transportation, agriculture, rescue operations, natural environment mapping, and many other allied domains has increased exponentially during the past few years. Some of the use cases of their applications range from aerial surveillance, data retrieval to their use in real-time communicative networks. Though UAVs were traditionally used only outdoors, many of its indoor applications like for rescue operations, inventory tracking in warehouses, etc., have recently emerged and these use cases are being actively explored. One of the major challenges for indoor drone applications is navigation and obstacle avoidance. Due to indoor operations, the global positioning system fails in accurate localization and navigation. To address this issue, we introduce a scheme that facilitates the autonomous navigation of UAVs (which have an onboard camera) in the indoor corridors of a building using deep-neural-networks-based processing of images. For a deep neural network, the selection of a good combination of hyperparameters for a better prediction is a complicated task. In this article, the hyperparameters tuning of a convolutional neural network is achieved by using genetic algorithms. The proposed architecture (DCNN-GA) is compared with state-of-the-art ImageNet models. The experimental results show the minimum loss and high performance of the proposed algorithm.

Air pollution monitoring, finding the hazardous zone, and future air quality predictions have recently become a significant issue for many researchers. With the adverse effect of low air quality on human health, it has become necessary for predicting the air quality index (AQI) accurately and on time. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can collect air quality data with high spatial and temporal resolutions. Using a fleet of UAVs could be considered a good option. In the proposed work, we implement a distributed federated learning (FL) algorithm within a UAV swarm that collects air quality data using built-in sensors. A scheme for finding the area with the highest AQI value is proposed using swarm intelligence. The collected data are then fed to a CNN-LSTM model to predict the AQI. The trained local model is sent to the central server, and the server aggregates the received models from UAVs in the swarm. A global model is created and is transmitted to the UAV swarm again in the next iteration. The proposed architecture is compared with other time-series models. The results show that the proposed model predicts AQI daily with a minimal error rate on a real-time data set from Delhi.

Virtualization is an essential feature in the IoT-resource-constrained environment due to which the service providers are facing challenges to minimize the energy consumption by IoT devices. Energy consumption models are pivotal in designing and optimizing energy-efficient operations to curb excessive energy consumption of IoT devices, which are an integral part of the modern data centers. A lot of research work has focused on efficient management of energy consumption by virtue of virtual machine consolidation. The existing virtualization techniques may not be suitable for this problem due to high computational overhead. As containers have been recently getting much popularity to encapsulate fog services, so they are the best candidate to handle this problem, especially for intelligent IoT devices. Keeping the focus on all these issues, in this article, we propose an energy-efficient container migration scheme by migrating the container from the source host server to the destination host server to meet the container's resource requirement. We used a novel approach to find the best destination host for container placement to solve host overload or underload problems using the best-fit container placement technique. The results obtained on the benchmark data set with respect to various performance evaluation metrics prove the efficacy of the designed scheme in comparison to the other existing state-of-the-art schemes.

In the last few years, we have witnessed the cache localization as one of the most challenging problems for device-to-device (D2D) communication in the IoT environment. It has been a major performance bottleneck due to cache localization problem in D2D communication as there are advancements in cellular technology, especially in 5G base stations (BSs) deployment around the globe. It is due to the fact that with an increase in the enormous amount of the number of users and devices, there has been an increase in the demands of service availability within a fraction of seconds by the end users. It results in an increase in burden on the existing network infrastructure with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provisions to the end users and service providers. However, caching the most popular content on the user equipments (UE's) can resolve the aforementioned problems. Motivated from these facts, in this article, we propose a model to address the problem of the cache localization decision making. In the proposed scheme, first, we collected the data set traces to predict the cache locations. Then, we predicted the locations where the user can cache the most accessed content using machine learning classification models. The classification models used in the proposed solution are decision tree and random forest. The metrics used for evaluation of the results obtained are access delay and energy consumption of the UEs. On comparing the proposal with the other existing state-of-the-art models, we observed that the random forest model yields higher accuracy as compared to other existing models. Also, we have observed that the access delay is maximum at the user's end when contents are shared with the gateway.