Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) plays a critical role in the Internet of Things (IoT) by identifying malfunctions and attacks. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely employed in MTSAD to capture spatial features but require predefined and explicit graph structures. Graph Structure Learning (GSL) addresses this limitation by jointly learning the graph structure and downstream tasks. However, existing GSL-based MTSAD methods fail to effectively leverage prior knowledge and struggle with insufficient GNN depth, limiting their ability to capture long-range dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose a multivariate time series anomaly detection method based on a learnable spatio-temporal graph ordinary differential equation network (STGODE), named MAD-ODE. Our approach leverages hybird graph learning, which includes two types of graph structures: a static similarity graph and a learnable graph. The static similarity graph is constructed using prior knowledge and provides a stable, interpretable representation of sensor dependencies. In contrast, the learnable graph captures complex relationships between sensors by optimizing its structure through backpropagation. This hybird graph learning effectively incorporates both prior knowledge and learned dependencies, ensuring robust and flexible modeling of sensor relationships. Furthermore, we design a STGODE predictor, which operates on both graph structures and employs continuous graph convolutional networks, enabling it to capturing long-range spatio-temporal dependencies for forecasting the next timestamp. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate that MAD-ODE achieves the best average performance and maintains stable results compared to existing methods.

To meet the massive compute and high-speed communication demands of Large Language Model (LLM) training, modern datacenters typically adopt multipath topologies such as Fat-Tree and Clos to host parallel jobs across hundreds to thousands of GPUs. However, LLM training exhibits periodic, high-bandwidth communication patterns. Existing load-balancing schemes become misaligned under dynamic congestion and anomalous surges: they struggle to promptly mitigate iteration-peak congestion and lack effective isolation of anomalous traffic. To address this, we propose Security-Aware Load Balancing (SALB) for LLM training. SALB leverages a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controller with queue and delay signals for packet-level multipath load balancing and employs path binding to confine suspicious flows. By integrating data security into load balancing, SALB simultaneously achieves high throughput and robust traffic isolation. NS-3 simulation results show that, compared with CONGA, Hermes, and ConWeave, SALB reduces the 99th-percentile flow completion time (FCT) of short flows by an average of 65% and increases the throughput of long flows by an average of 54%. It further outperforms the baselines in aggregate throughput, path utilization, and packet loss rate, thereby significantly enhancing system stability, robustness, and data security.

The industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) has attracted extensive attention due to its real-time and automation characteristics. Edge computing and blockchain technologies facilitate the IIoT in terms of low latency services and data security respectively. However, with the continuous expansion of industrial data and the growth of industrial nodes, traditional blockchain technology has some critical limitations on low transaction throughput and high data storage costs. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-blockchain adopts a graph structure of a single transaction as the basic unit, and it has the characteristics of asynchronous consensus. Some existing studies use DAGblockchain to replace the traditional blockchain to alleviate its low throughput problems like IOTA. However, with the rapid data generation in the IIoT environment, the topology scale of DAG-blockchain will increase sharply, which will aggravate the data storage cost of blockchain nodes. In this article, to reduce the data storage cost of edge servers, we design a Graphpartition based storage strategy for DAG-Blockchain (GpDB), equipped with a graph partition algorithm based on transaction freshness, which can partition DAG-blockchain topology in edge servers into two parts, which will be retained and removed respectively. Simulation shows that, in terms of storage cost, GpDB outperforms LDV and Layerchain by 62% and 74% respectively, and with the increasing number of transactions, GpDB has good scalability in reducing the storage cost, and better transaction throughput than IOTA.

With the rapid development of the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) in recent years, it has emerged as a promising solution to alleviate the workload of medical staff, particularly in the field of Medical Image Quality Assessment (MIQA). By deploying MIQA based on IoMT, it proves to be highly valuable in assisting the diagnosis and treatment of various types of medical images, such as fundus images, ultrasound images, and dermoscopic images. However, traditional MIQA models necessitate a substantial number of labeled medical images to be effective, which poses a challenge in acquiring a sufficient training dataset. To address this issue, we present a label-free MIQA model developed through a zero-shot learning approach. This paper introduces a Semantics-Aware Contrastive Learning (SCL) model that can effectively generalise quality assessment to diverse medical image types. The proposed method integrates features extracted from zero-shot learning, the spatial domain, and the frequency domain. Zero-shot learning is achieved through a tailored Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Natural Scene Statistics (NSS) and patch-based features are extracted in the spatial domain, while frequency features are hierarchically extracted from both local and global levels. All of this information is utilised to derive a final quality score for a medical image. To ensure a comprehensive evaluation, we not only utilise two existing datasets, EyeQ and LiverQ, but also create a dataset specifically for skin image quality assessment. As a result, our SCL method undergoes extensive evaluation using all three medical image quality datasets, demonstrating its superiority over advanced models.

The World Wide Web (Web) is a crucial part of the Internet. Web attacks are becoming more and more serious and complex. Malicious Web request detection aims to rapidly and accurately identify abnormal attacks on the network. Deep learning is being applied to malicious Web request detection, resulting in high detection performance. However, most deep learning-based methods are supervised and ignore special characters, which are hard to detect unknown malicious Web requests. The labels of Web request are fewer and Web request data is insufficient. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised malicious Web request detection based on transformer and contrastive learning (UTCDetector). UTCDetector exploits preprocessing and 2-gram word segmentationto preserve special characters, extracts semantic feature by Transformer, and leverages hypersphere loss function and contrastive learning to handle insufficient Web data without abnormal label. Since the public Web request datasets (CSIC 2010, CSIC TORPEDA 2012, and ECML/PKDD 2007) were created before 2012, we collected Web requests from a university Web application server in 2023 to build a private dataset named School 2023. This dataset contains more modern and complex attacks. The experimental results on the four datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a higher F1-score than other existing methods and ablation variants.

In the vehicular networks (VN) assisted by the integration of sensing and communication (ISAC), rapid processing of data from sensors is a necessary condition to ensure safe driving and enhance user experience. Utilizing the computational resources of the roadside unit (RSU) can effectively reduce the task processing delay. However, in some areas of the road, uneven distribution of task-vehicles can lead to severe load imbalance in neighbouring RSUs, and these tasks often have different delay requirements. The tasks in the high-load area can be offloaded to the low-load area to balance the load. We use the idle-vehicles in the low-load RSU area that are close to the task-vehicles as relays to hop and offload the tasks to the low-load RSUs. On the other hand, in order to satisfy the delay requirements of the heterogeneous tasks, this paper proposes the priority ordering of the heterogeneous tasks, the more delay-sensitive tasks require more resources to meet their delay requirements, i.e., the higher the priority. In order to both satisfy the delay requirements of heterogeneous tasks and maintain a small average system delay, we establish the optimization problem of minimizing the weighted average system delay and solve it by using the Relay Hopping and Differentiated Task Prioritization (RHATP) algorithm. Simulation results show that under the condition of guaranteeing the delay requirement of high-priority tasks, the strategy can achieve lower system delay and effectively reduce the processing delay in high-load areas. And it still maintains stable performance in different scenarios.

Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) plays a crucial role in the Internet of Things (IoT) to identify device malfunction or system attacks. Graph neural networks (GNN) are widely applied in MTSAD to capture the spatial features among sensors. However, GNNs depend on a graph structure and explicit graph structures are not always available. To solve the problem of missing explicit graph structure, graph structure learning is introduced to learn an accurate graph structure joint with a GNNs-based anomaly detection task. However, the existing GSL-based methods provide only a partial view of the graph structure and cannot represent multiple and complex relationships. The noise of data also brings noisy edges. Therefore, we propose a fusion graph structure learning-based multivariate time-series anomaly detection with structured prior knowledge (FuGLAD). To the best of our knowledge, it appears to be the first application of fusion graphs in time series anomaly detection. FuGLAD selects three kinds of typical graph structure learners to learn as many relationship types among sensors as possible and exploits the prior similarity to evaluate the importance of all learned graphs and adaptively learn the fusion weight instead of the direct average weight. To handle noise in raw data, FuGLAD compares the neighbors of nodes by Jaccard similarity to identify and remove the noisy edges in the prior graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art single-graph structure learning techniques in detection performance across four public and real-world datasets.

Biomedical image segmentation plays an important role in Diabetic Retinopathy (DR)-related biomarker detection. DR is an ocular disease that affects the retina in people with diabetes and could lead to visual impairment if management measures are not taken in a timely manner. In DR screening programs, the presence and severity of DR are identified and classified based on various microvascular lesions detected by qualified ophthalmic screeners. Such a detection process is time-consuming and error-prone, given the small size of the microvascular lesions and the volume of images, especially with the increasing prevalence of diabetes. Automated image processing using deep learning methods is recognized as a promising approach to support diabetic retinopathy screening. In this paper, we propose a novel compound scaling encoder-decoder network architecture to improve the accuracy and running efficiency of microvascular lesion segmentation. In the encoder phase, we develop a lightweight encoder to speed up the training process, where the encoder network is scaled up in depth, width, and resolution dimensions. In the decoder phase, an attention mechanism is introduced to yield higher accuracy. Specifically, we employ Concurrent Spatial and Channel Squeeze and Channel Excitation (scSE) blocks to fully utilise both spatial and channel-wise information. Additionally, a compound loss function is incorporated with transfer learning to handle the problem of imbalanced data and further improve performance. To assess performance, our method is evaluated on two large-scale lesion segmentation datasets: DDR and FGADR datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other competent methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/DeweiYi/CoSED-Net.

The issue of data privacy protection must be considered in distributed federated learning (FL) so as to ensure that sensitive information is not leaked. In this article, we propose a two-stage differential privacy (DP) framework for FL based on edge intelligence. Various levels of privacy preservation can be provided according to the degree of data sensitivity. In the first stage, the randomized response mechanism is used to perturb the original feature data by the user terminal for data desensitization, and the user can self-regulate the level of privacy preservation. In the second stage, noise is added to the local models by the edge server to further guarantee the privacy of the models. Finally, the model updates are aggregated in the cloud. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed end-edge-cloud FL framework in terms of training accuracy and convergence, extensive experiments are conducted on a real electrocardiogram (ECG) signal dataset. Bi-directional long-short-term memory (BiLSTM) neural network is adopted to training classification model. The effect of different combinations of feature perturbation and noise addition on the model accuracy is analyzed depending on different privacy budgets and parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed privacy-preserving framework provides good accuracy and convergence while ensuring privacy.

Logs record both the normal and abnormal system operating status at any time, which are crucial data during system operation. Log anomaly detection can help with system debugging and analyzing root causes, such as system fault, shutdown fault, null-pointer exception, illegal-argument exception, and class cast exception. Deep learning is widely applied to log anomaly detection to enhance detection accuracy. However, the deep learning model requires a lot of label logs, which consume large amounts of labor and time. To tackle this label requirement problem, the pre-training model is introduced, for instance, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). However, the pre-training model brings new problems. The parameters of BERT needed to be fine-tuned are huge, resulting in a high training overhead. Besides, the direct word sequence input representation of BERT ignores the semantic information among logs. Therefore, we propose a parameter-efficient log anomaly detection scheme (LogBP-LORA) based on BERT and Low-Rank Adaptation (LORA). LORA is an effective parameter-tuning strategy. LogBP-LORA increases bypass weight matrices and only updates the bypass parameters instead of all the original parameters to reduce the training overhead. Additionally, LogBP-LORA exploits log event sequence representation to obtain more semantic information with a shorter sequence length. Extensive experiments carry on three public log datasets, BGL, Thunderbird, and HDFS, demonstrate LogBP-LORA can obtain favorable performance with lower resource consumption. When fewer label data is available, LogBP-LORA achieves about 10%-99% higher F1-score compared with Neurallog, Deeplog, MADDC, and Loganomaly. The training parameters of LogBP-LoRA are only 0.06% of the original parameters of BERT.

Abstract With oceanic reverberation and a large amount of data being the main sources of interference for underwater acoustic target detection, it is difficult to obtain a more robust detection performance by relying on the traditional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection method. An adaptive sonar CFAR detection method based on a back propagation (BP) neural network is proposed. The method combines the artificial intelligence algorithm and the traditional detection algorithm, and uses the classification ability of the algorithm to select the detection algorithm, which can effectively improve the adaptation ability of the algorithm and the environment and the false alarm control ability. The method combines the artificial intelligence algorithm and the traditional detection algorithm, and uses the classification ability of the algorithm to select the detection algorithm, which can effectively improve the adaptation ability of the algorithm and the environment and the false alarm control ability. This method uses a BP neural network to train the target echo signal to complete the clutter background classification and establish the clutter background recognition classification set. According to the output result of each classification, the best CFAR detector is selected from four CA/SO/GO/OS‐CFAR detectors to detect the target. The simulation results show the detection performance of the proposed method in a uniform environment, a multi‐target environment, and a clutter edge environment. The results show that the environment adaptability is strong for different clutter backgrounds, which further improves the control ability of false alarms under a non‐uniform background.

In the modern era, the Cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT) in conjunction with IoT evolves which provides the intelligence power of sensing and computation for next-generation IoT (Nx-IoT) networks. The data scientists have discovered a large amount of techniques for knowledge discovery from processed data in CIoT. This task is accomplished successfully and data proceeds for further processing. The major cause for the failure of IoT devices is due to the attacks, in which Web spam is more prominent. There seems a requirement of a technique which can detect the Web spam before it enters into a device. Motivated from these issues, in this article, a cognitive spammer framework (CSF) for Web spam detection is proposed. CSF detects the Web spam by fuzzy rule-based classifiers along with machine learning classifiers. Each classifier produces the quality score of the webpage. These quality scores are then ensembled to generate a single score, which predicts the spamicity of the webpage. For ensembling, the fuzzy voting approach is used in CSF. The experiments were performed using a standard data set WEBSPAM-UK 2007 with respect to accuracy and overhead generated. From the results obtained, it has been demonstrated that CSF improves the accuracy by 97.3%, which is comparatively high in comparison to the other existing approaches in the literature.

The Internet of Behavior is the recent trend in the Internet of Things (IoT), which analyzes the behaviour of individuals using huge amounts of data collected from their activities. The behavioural data collection process from an individual to a data center in the network layer of the IoT is addressed by the Routing Protocol for Low-powered Lossy Networks (RPL) downward routing policy. A hybrid mode of operation in RPL is designed to minimize the limitations of standard modes of operations in the downward routing of RPL. The existing hybrid modes use the common parameters, such as routing table capacity, energy level, and hop-count for making storing mode decisions at each node. However, none of these works have utilized the deciding parameters, such as number of Destination-Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) children, rank, and transmission traffic density for this purpose. In this article, we propose two hybrid MOPs for RPL focusing on the aspect of efficient downward communication for the Internet of Behaviors. The first version decides the mode of each node based on the rank and number of DODAG children of the node. In addition, the proposed Mode of Operation (MOP) has the provision to balance the task of a storing node that is currently running on low power and computational resources by a handover mechanism among the ancestors. The second version of the hybrid MOP utilizes the upward and downward transmission traffic probabilities together with 170 rule or 1D cellular automata to decide the operating mode of a node. The analysis on the upper bound on communication shows that both proposed works have communication overhead nearly equal to the storing mode. The experimental results also infer that the proposed adaptive MOP have lower communication overhead compared with standard storing modes and existing schemes ARPL, MERPL, and HIMOPD.

Efficient task and resource allocation techniques are critical to managing the relationships between the components of cloud, fog, and mist-assisted Internet of Things networks. Fulfilling this function necessarily implicates concerns between two affected groups, users, who prioritize cost-effectiveness and latency, and service providers, who prioritize efficient and cost-effective resource management. While there is no single solution that is capable of simultaneously wholly optimizing the experiences of both groups, solutions that ensure mutual satisfaction can be achieved. To accomplish this, we developed an algorithm that first derives two objective functions, user and service provider satisfaction, from data concerning service provisioning, user preferences, and resources utilization. The algorithm then combines these functions into a mutual objective function that maximizes satisfaction of both individuals. Next, available computing nodes are ordered in a list, prioritizing by compromising factors, and the most appropriate node(s) for task completion are selected. The proposed algorithm was tested extensively through simulations and compared with existing techniques. Ultimately, the proposed algorithm outperformed alternatives across every metric, illustrating its utility as a means of achieving mutual satisfaction and improving quality of service.

TO BUILD a sustainable ecosystem, healthcare reinforced by the Internet of Things (IoT-Health) is a sector that makes a very useful contribution to society. With the aging of the world's population, the ability to monitor and protect people at home reduces costs and increases the quality of life. IoT healthcare has become a market with great potential, and IT giants such as IBM, Microsoft, and GE Healthcare develop products for specialized medical applications. Using IoT-Health for data collection and workflow automation is a great way to reduce waste and minimize human errors. However, the security of healthcare information is a major concern, and cybersecurity has become a significant threat for healthcare providers as well as governments to achieve sustainable city milestones. IT professionals must continually resolve health data security issues to help patients and the damage that healthcare security breaches can have on their lives.

The recent development has enlightened health informatics on the Internet of medical Things (IoT) 5.0. Healthcare services have seen greater acceptance of information and communications technology (ICT) in recent years; in light of the increasing volume of patient data, the traditional way of storing data in physical files has eventually moved to a digital alternative such as electronic health record (EHR). However, conventional healthcare data systems are plagued with a single point of failure, security issues, mutable logging, and inefficient methods to retrieve healthcare records. Social linked data (Solid) has been developed as a decentralized technology to alter digital data sharing and ownership for its users radically. However, Solid alone cannot address all the security issues posed to data exchange and storage. Present research combines two decentralized technologies, Solid ecosystem and blockchain technology, to tackle all potential security issues using solidity-based smart contracts, thereby providing a secure patient-centric design for the complex under developing EHR data exchange.

Data/tasks of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are extremely private and valuable to computing. Edge computing facilitates IIoT services by offering platforms of supportive facilities and functionalities. However, the convergence of intelligent edge computing and IIoT platforms has been held back by the need to develop systems for maintaining security and privacy. In this article, we propose a new framework for securely and confidentially sending, storing, and computing IIoT tasks. This framework employs a lightweight encryption scheme alongside modified ElGamal encryption and digital signature schemes. We analyzed the robustness of this framework in terms of security and privacy, and assessed its performance through simulations. Ultimately, the proposed framework outperformed the existing models in terms of time complexity, latency, and energy consumption.

To build a sustainable ecosystem, healthcare reinforced by the Internet of Things (IoT-Health) is a sector that makes a very useful contribution to society. With the aging of the world's population, the ability to monitor and protect people at home reduces costs and increases the quality of life. IoT healthcare has become a market with great potential, and IT giants such as IBM, Microsoft, and GE Healthcare develop products for specialized medical applications. Using IoT-Health for data collection and workflow automation is a great way to reduce waste and minimize human errors. However, the security of healthcare information is a major concern, and cybersecurity has become a significant threat for healthcare providers as well as governments to achieve sustainable city milestones. IT professionals must continually resolve health data security issues to help patients and the damage that healthcare security breaches can have on their lives.

Critical infrastructure comprising on-demand devices, including secondary servers, comes into play when a situation like an overload is involved. The on-demand servers and devices require smart management solutions that form an integral part of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). This work considers AIoT as a combination of Mobile-Internet of Things (M-IoT) and AI requiring immediate response, secondary support system, and computational resources. Privacy in AIoT is always a concern when sharing information as intruders can eavesdrop on the settings of the system. This article uses an osmotic computing paradigm, which enables the derivation of strategies to decide on the methods of sharing services via optimal and privacy-aware resource management in AIoT. A safety competition is built on top of configuration rewards that help to attain privacy-by-design. The contributions of this article are expressed using theoretical analysis and numerical simulations.

Due to high capacity and fast transmission speed, 5G plays a key role in modern electronic infrastructure. Meanwhile, sparse tensor factorization (STF) is a useful tool for dimension reduction to analyze high-order, high-dimension, and sparse tensor (HOHDST) data, which is transmitted on 5G Internet-of-things (IoT). Hence, HOHDST data relies on STF to obtain complete data and discover rules for real time and accurate analysis. From another view of computation and data security, the current STF solution seeks to improve the computational efficiency but neglects privacy security of the IoT data, e.g., data analysis for network traffic monitor system. To overcome these problems, this article proposes a multiple-strategies differential privacy framework on STF (MDPSTF) for HOHDST network traffic data analysis.MDPSTFcomprises three differential privacy (DP) mechanisms, i.e.,$\varepsilon -$DP, concentrated DP, and local DP. Furthermore, the theoretical proof of privacy bound is presented. Hence,MDPSTFcan provide general data protection for HOHDST network traffic data with high-security promise. We conduct experiments on two real network traffic datasets ($Abilene$and$G\grave{E}ANT$). The experimental results show thatMDPSTFhas high universality on the various degrees of privacy protection demands and high recovery accuracy for the HOHDST network traffic data.

Taxi demand prediction plays a significant role in assisting the pre-allocation of taxi resources to avoid mismatches between demand and service, particularly in the era of the sharing economy and autonomous driving. However, most studies have only tried to figure out the complex spatial-temporal pattern of taxi demand from historical taxi demand series, neglecting the intrinsic influences of regional functions, and failing to effectively capture the dynamic long-term periodicity. In this paper, we make two important observations: (1) taxi demand pattern varies significantly between different functional regions; and (2) taxi demand follows a dynamic daily and weekly pattern. To address these two issues, we adopt Points of Interest (POIs) to identify regional functions, and propose a novel BERT-based Deep Spatial-Temporal Network (BDSTN) to model the complex spatial-temporal relations from heterogeneous local and global features. In BDSTN, a Spatiotemporal Pattern Matching module is introduced to capture the complex spatiotemporal pattern of taxi demand while considering its dynamic temporal periodicity, and a Functional Similarity Embedding module is adopted to learn the functional similarity among all regions via POIs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use BERT-based architecture to learn taxi demand patterns, and is also the first to take functional similarity represented by POIs into consideration. Our experimental results on real-world traffic datasets in New York City demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, and that the efficiency of our proposed model is higher than other deep learning methods.

In this study, a high accident risk prediction model is developed to analyze traffic accident data, and identify priority intersections for improvement. A database of the traffic accidents was organized and analyzed, and an intersection accident risk prediction model based on different mechanical learning methods was created to estimate the possible high accident risk locations for traffic management departments to use in planning countermeasures to reduce accident risk. Using Bayes’ theorem to identify environmental variables at intersections that affect accident risk levels, this study found that road width, speed limit and roadside markings are the significant risk factors for traffic accidents. Meanwhile, Naïve Bayes, Decision tree C4.5, Bayesian Network, Multilayer perceptron (MLP), Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Deep Belief Network (DBN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) were used to develop an accident risk prediction model. This model can also identify the key factors that affect the occurrence of high-risk intersections, and provide traffic management departments with a better basis for decision-making for intersection improvement. Using the same environmental characteristics as high-risk intersections for model inputs to estimate the degree of risk that may occur in the future, which can be used to prevent traffic accidents in the future. Moreover, it also can be used as a reference for future intersection design and environmental improvements.

Obtaining timely and accurate traffic information is one of the most important problems in intelligent transportation system, which will make vehicles run smoothly, avoid road congestion, save road running time and reduce vehicle energy consumption. In the current Internet of Vehicles system, the traffic management center can learn from the feedback information of all vehicles to improve the ability of decision-making and traffic command. However, the existing feedback mechanism does not respond to the spatial-temporal characteristics of data in time, due to the lack of communication capability of the current equipment. So, it cannot meet the requirements of ultra-low delay, high reliability and high security in the Internet of Vehicles. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a blockchain-based proxy vote and revocation scheme for decision feedback in Internet of Vehicles, which allows the intelligent system to ignore the unevenness and heterogeneity in the 6G technology. In addition, blockchain technology notarizes the vote data of vehicles and outsources microservices. Secondly, we use the attributes of decision-related nodes instead of their identities to enable anonymous vote. Smart contracts can automatically expand the scalability of outsourced microservices. Finally, the security proof of the proposed scheme ensures the security and consistency of outsourced microservices. The simulation results also show that our scheme greatly improves the efficiency of voting feedback.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is expected to provide reliable and low-latency computation offloading for massive Internet of Things (IoT) with the next generation networks, such as the sixth-generation (6G) network. However, the successful implementation of 6G depends on network densification, which brings new offloading challenges for edge computing, one of which is how to make offloading decisions facing densified servers considering both channel interference and queuing, which is an NP-hard problem. This article proposes a distributed-two-stage offloading (DTSO) strategy to give tradeoff solutions. In the first stage, by introducing the queuing theory and considering channel interference, a combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to calculate the offloading probability of each station. In the second stage, the original problem is converted to a nonlinear optimization problem, which is solved by a designed sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm. To make an adjustable tradeoff between the latency and energy requirement among heterogeneous applications, an elasticity parameter is specially designed in DTSO. Simulation results show that compared to the latest works, DTSO can effectively reduce latency and energy consumption and achieve a balance between them based on application preferences.

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoTs), 5 G and artificial intelligence (AI) technology have been dramatically incentivizing the advancement of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in recent years. Profile matching technology can be used to realize the sharing of medical information between patients by matching similar symptom attributes. However, the symptom attributes are associated with patients' sensitive information such as gender, age, physiological data, and other personal health information, thus the privacy of patients will be revealed during the matching process in the IoMT. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a verifiable private set intersection scheme to achieve fine-grained profile matching. On the one hand, the privacy data of patients can be divided by multi-tag to implement fine-grained operations. On the other hand, re-encryption technique is utilized to protect the privacy of patients. In addition, the cloud server may violate the scheme, thus a verifiable mechanism is leveraged to check the correctness of computation. The analysis of security indicates that our proposed scheme can resist the untrusted cloud server and the performance simulation demonstrates that our scheme improves efficiency by reducing the use of bilinear pairs.

Conventional centralized architectures are sufficiently educated to provide high scalability, availability, and low latency and bandwidth usages for the Internet of Things (IoT) network. The exponential increase in volume and number of IoT devices in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) turns our physical world into the cyber world. Security and privacy in the ITS network have become the main concern. To address these issues and challenges, a secure distributed mist computing network architecture for ITS is proposed by leveraging the features of blockchain technology. In this model, we present IoT user/device registration and authentication algorithms and enable the computing resources at the extreme edge of the network by deploying a smart contract. The proposed model uses an aggregate signature scheme to generate a signature for multiple IoT devices. To evaluate the proposed model, we performed an experimental analysis based on various performance measures. The proposed model gains 81% of lower median latency at local nodes compared to the core model. The result shows that the model performed effectively and a suitable solution for various ITS applications.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been proposed in recent years to process resource-intensive and delay-sensitive applications at the edge of mobile networks, which can break the hardware limitations and resource constraints at user equipment (UE). In order to fully use the MEC server resource, how to maximize the number of offloaded tasks is meaningful especially for crowded place or disaster area. In this paper, an optimal partial offloading scheme POSMU (Partial Offloading Strategy Maximizing the User task number) is proposed to obtain the optimal offloading ratio, local computing frequency, transmission power and MEC server computing frequency for each UE. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem (MINLP), which is NP-hard and challenging to solve. As such, we convert the problem into multiple nonlinear programming problems (NLPs) and propose an efficient algorithm to solve them by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) as well as convex optimization techniques. Besides, we can seamlessly apply POSMU to UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) enabled MEC system by analyzing the 3D communication model. The optimality of POSMU is illustrated in numerical results, and POSMU can approximately maximize the number of offloaded tasks compared to other schemes.

As a successful application of edge computing in the industrial production environment, prolonging the smart devices' (SDs') battery lifetime has become an important issue. In some special practical applications, the uploaded data from SDs to vehicle base stations (VBSs) or servers can be merged between SDs with a fixed size, which is called superposed data. In this article, we consider the superposed data uploading problem in a decentralized device-to-device communication system. The task of the problem is to minimize the total energy consumption of uploading data. We reduce it into a combinatorial optimization problem from the graph theory perspective. For VBSs or servers with infinite capacities, we propose an optimal algorithm with polynomial running time. When VBSs or servers have limited capacities, the problem is NP-hard even in very special cases. For this NP-hard problem, we give two heuristic algorithms and the corresponding numerical simulation results.

Improving quality of service (QoS) of low power and lossy networks (LLNs) in Internet of things (IoT) is a major challenge. Cluster-based routing technique is an effective approach to achieve this goal. This paper proposes a QoS-aware clustering-based routing (QACR) mechanism for LLNs in Fog-enabled IoT which provides a clustering, a cluster head (CH) election, and a routing path selection technique. The clustering adopts the community detection algorithm that partitions the network into clusters with available nodes' connectivity. The CH election and relay node selection both are weighted by the rank of the nodes which take node's energy, received signal strength, link quality, and number of cluster members into consideration as the ranking metrics. The number of CHs in a cluster is adaptive and varied according to a cluster state to balance the energy consumption of nodes. Besides, the protocol uses the CH role handover technique during CH election that decreases the control messages for the periodic election and cluster formation in detail. An evaluation of the QACR has performed through simulations for various scenarios. The obtained results show that the QACR improves the QoS in terms of packet delivery ratio, latency, and network lifetime compared to the existing protocols.

The digitalization and massive adoption of advanced technologies in the automotive industry not only transform the equipment manufacturer's operating mode, but also change the current business models. The increased adoption of autonomous cars is expected to disrupt government regulations, manufacturing, insurance, and maintenance services. Moreover, providing integrated, personalized, and on-demand services have shared, connected, and autonomous cars in the smart city for a sustainable ecosystem. To address these issues in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed framework for the automotive industry in the smart city. The proposed framework includes a novel miner node selection algorithm for the blockchain-based distributed network architecture. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed framework, we simulated the proposed model on a private Ethereum blockchain platform using captured dataset of mined blocks from litecoinpool.org. The simulation results show the proof-of-concept of the proposed model that can be used for wide range of future smart applications.

Technological advances over the last decade in the field of wireless communications have resulted in the improvement of small and low cost sensor nodes outfitted with wireless communication abilities capable of establishing wireless sensor network (WSN). Due to the expansion of Internet of Things (IoT), there are many areas in IoT application where WSN applications are found. These applications generally impose severe constraints on the lifetime of the WSN, which is expected to last several years. It is necessary to diminish the overall energy consumption of the sensor node and to find an additional source of energy for achieving this objective. On the other hand, due to the imminent crisis of the radio frequency spectrum, light fidelity (LiFi) offers many key benefits and effective solutions for these issues that have been postured in the most recent decade. In this paper, we propose a novel EH-HL model for future smart homes and industries based on the integration of energy harvesting WSN (EH-WSN) and hybrid LiFi/WiFi communication techniques. The proposed model is capable of efficiently transmitting data at high speed for bidirectional multidevice and by harvesting energy, we provide the power to the sensor nodes. To synchronize multidevice transmissions, transmit data and provide low-cost wireless communication, we used the color beams of the red, green, and blue LEDs. The result of the evaluation shows that the hybrid communication scheme is proposed in the EH-HL model. It also offers superior performance and achieves a data rate of 25 Mb/s for multiaccess/multiusers.