The unpredictable nature of rip currents makes them a leading cause of coastal drowning incidents globally. Traditional methods fall short, necessitating an advanced surveillance system that can prioritize critical threats, enable autonomous decision-making with adaptive network control, and optimize resource allocation for enhanced coastal safety. Intent-based networking (IBN) plays a pivotal role in converting high-level intents into automated processes, enabling dynamic control and intelligent resource allocation in critical applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based coastal surveillance. This study proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, IBN-driven framework for coastal surveillance that leverages UAVs and IoT devices to enable real-time rip current analysis through advanced segmentation techniques. In our framework, UAVs with AI-powered IoT systems perform initial rip current analysis using lightweight deep-learning models. High-risk detections are prioritized through the closed-loop feedback mechanism of the IBN and transmitted to control rooms for validation and response, ensuring efficient resource utilization and adaptive surveillance. We expanded the rip current dataset to enhance the segmentation accuracy by incorporating additional samples from open-source platforms and applying diverse environmental conditions. We trained YOLO models and Mask R-CNN, which are suitable for real-time rip current analysis. In addition, we introduced a modified YOLOv11n-seg model, replacing the C3K2 block with C2F and optimizing the channels to reduce the parameters while maintaining accuracy. The best-performing models were tested on edge devices to evaluate the time complexity and reliability.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-mounted simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) systems can provide full-dimensional coverage and flexible deployment opportunities in future 6G-enabled IoT networks. However, practical imperfections such as jittering and airflow of UAV could affect the phase shift of STAR-RIS, and consequently degrade network security. In this respect, this paper investigates the impact of phase shift errors on the secrecy performance of UAV-mounted STAR-RIS-assisted IoT systems. More specifically, we consider a UAV-mounted STAR-RIS-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system where IoT devices are grouped into two groups: one group on each side of the STAR-RIS. The nodes in each group are considered as potential Malicious nodes for the ones on the other side. By modeling phase estimation errors using a von Mises distribution, an analytical closed-form expressions for the ergodic secrecy rates under imperfect phase adjustment are derived. An optimization problem to maximize the weighted sum secrecy rate (WSSR) by optimizing the UAV placement is formulated and is then solved using a linear grid-based algorithm. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to validate the analytical derivations. The impact of phase estimation errors on system’s secrecy performance is analyzed, providing critical insights for the practical realisation of STAR-RIS deployments for secure UAV-enabled IoT networks.

Ensuring the secure communication of unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted reconfigurable intelligent surface (UAV-RIS) is crucial in maintaining seamless connection in next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) networks. For this purpose, intelligent beamforming is essential to ensure secure data transmission from IoT devices to UAV-RIS and optimize communication while preventing adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a novel framework of federated learning for long short-term memory-based deep deterministic policy gradient with an attention mechanism (F-DDPG-AM). The proposed algorithm aims to improve security and mitigate potential threats in UAV-RIS-assisted IoT networks. The F-DDPG-AM combines the federated LSTM’s power to capture long-term dependencies in sequential data with the attention mechanism to focus on key network states and improve decision-making efficiency. The F-DDPG-AM framework improves learning efficiency, accelerates convergence, and enhances resilience against adversarial attacks by selectively prioritizing crucial network information and focusing on insecure scenarios. In addition, federated learning in the proposal ensures secure decision-making through local training for UAV-RIS-enabled IoT networks. The F-DDPG-AM enhances system scalability, trustworthiness, and compliance with secure machine learning principles by decentralizing the training process. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed F-DDPG-AM framework in defending against attacks, significantly outperforming traditional security approaches and other existing reinforcement learning models.

Auditory stimuli strongly shape emotional and physiological states, making them central to affective computing and mental health technologies. We present the study of three auditory conditions, spiritual meditation (SM), music (M), and natural silence (NS), using acoustic time-series signals. To support this, we introduce the Spiritual, Music, Silence Acoustic Time Series (SMSAT) dataset, a benchmark of controlled acoustic recordings with demographic diversity. We develop a contrastive learning-based SMSAT encoder that learns discriminative embeddings from ATS data, achieving 99% accuracy. In addition, we propose the Calmness Analysis Model (CAM), integrating multi-domain features for affective state classification, achieving a 99% accuracy in the three-stimulus classification task. Inter & intra-class feature space separability, calmness evaluation using Temporal Segmented Response Profiling (TSRP) confirm significant physiological differences across auditory conditions, with SM showing stronger effects on cardiac response characteristics (CRC).WaveGAN is used to generate additional dataset. Under subject-wise evaluation, CAM reached$98.4\%$accuracy, and the SMSAT Encoder achieved$96.5\%$accuracy. This work provides a validated dataset and scalable deep learning framework for stress monitoring, well-being, and therapeutic audio interventions.

This paper investigates the secure communication capabilities of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network supported by a STAR-RIS (simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface) deployed on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), in the presence of passive eavesdroppers. The STAR-RIS facilitates concurrent signal reflection and transmission, allowing multiple legitimate users-grouped via NOMA-to be served efficiently, thereby improving spectral utilization. Each user contends with an associated eavesdropper, creating a stringent security scenario. Under Nakagami fading conditions and accounting for phase shift inaccuracies in the STAR-RIS, closed-form expressions for the ergodic secrecy rates of users in both transmission and reflection paths are derived. An optimization framework is then developed to jointly adjust the UAV's positioning and the STAR-RIS power splitting coefficient, aiming to maximize the system's secrecy rate. The proposed approach enhances secure transmission in STAR-RIS-NOMA configurations under realistic hardware constraints and offers valuable guidance for the design of future 6G wireless networks.

Timely and accurate crop damage classification (CDC) is vital for informed decision-making in the industry of precision agriculture. Traditional manual methods are slow and unreliable, whereas recent deep learning models, although accurate, are often too computationally intensive for resource-constrained environments. In this study, we present LNetCDC, a lightweight attention-based convolutional neural network tailored for CDC. The architecture integrates an EchoBlock for efficient feature extraction, combined with residual pathways enhanced by“Channelwise Refine”and“Dual Gate Attention”modules to emphasize critical spatial and channelwise features. Also, dilated convolutions are incorporated into deeper layers to capture multiscale contextual patterns. We evaluated our LNetCDC on a benchmark crop damage dataset, where it outperformed existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Notably, it achieves around 2.3% gain in accuracy with only 0.86 million parameters compared with 1.13 million in the prior SOTA model for CDC. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and suitability of LNetCDC for real-time deployment on industrial edge devices.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have gained considerable interest because of their inherent passive and energy-efficient design. Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), known as UAV-RIS, can significantly improve network performance and serve as a crucial enabler for advancements in 6G mobile networks. However, ensuring security in UAV-RIS systems poses notable challenges, particularly in the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI) and beamforming complexities. In this paper, we identify the critical security requirements for UAV-RIS beamforming in practical scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel deep deterministic policy gradient with a distributional critic (DDPG-DC)-based beamforming approach aimed at securing UAV-RIS systems while improving the overall secrecy rate. Our proposed secure beamforming solution achieves up to a 48% performance improvement compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in integration with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) play a crucial role in improving wireless communication coverage and enhancing overall performance. However, optimizing the beamforming for the RIS and base station (BS) is critical in improving coverage and ensuring connectivity in densely populated areas. The primary challenge in this process arises from the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements set by user equipment (UEs). To address this complexity, machine learning algorithms are employed to predict the optimal beamforming configurations for both the BS and RIS. However, the traditional supervised learning methods are becoming less effective due to the ever-changing demands of UEs, as these methods rely on fixed data patterns that struggle to adapt to the fluctuating QoS requirements of UEs. Thus, in this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning-based deep learning (DL) approach to jointly predict the optimal beamforming matrix for RIS and BS, enhancing communication coverage and maximizing QoS satisfaction of UEs. The proposed DL-based beamforming adaptively predicts the beamforming matrix, facilitates efficient data exploration during the initial learning phase, and seamlessly scales as the process advances, thereby enhancing overall performance. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DL-based RIS and BS beamforming outperforms by up to 89%, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

As sixth-generation (6G) networks advance to enable massive connectivity and intelligent services, energy efficiency becomes a vital concern, particularly for battery- and edge-powered devices. Building on previous work in task-oriented semantic communication using deep reinforcement learning, this paper proposes an energy-efficient semantic communication framework based on an enhanced Twin-Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm integrated with an Adaptive Semantic Compression Policy (ASCP). In the proposed framework, we incorporate a predictive channel-aware semantic forecasting (PCSF) module, which leverages lightweight long short-term memory (LSTM) learning models to predict short-term fluctuations in channel conditions. By proactively anticipating variations in signal quality, the agent adjusts semantic compression levels and transmission strategies in advance, enhancing both energy efficiency and the preservation of task-relevant semantic information, particularly under rapidly changing network dynamics. Simulation results show that our energy-aware TD3-ASCP framework, enhanced with PCSF, significantly improves transmission efficiency and accuracy by up to 32% and 26%, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are essential for extending wireless network coverage in rural and disaster-affected areas by acting as airborne base stations or communication relays. However, UAV operations face significant challenges due to limited onboard energy and constrained transmission power, which limit flight endurance and communication performance. This paper introduces a novel multi-critic deep reinforcement learning (MC-DRL) method, built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework, to optimize UAV trajectory planning while reducing energy consumption. Unlike standard SAC, the proposed approach employs multiple critic networks, each focused on a specific objective, such as energy consumption, quality of service, and fairness. Such multi-critic architecture enhances the accuracy of value estimation and enables the DRL agent to effectively balance competing goals, leading to more robust and energy-efficient trajectory policies. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MC-DRL method and achieve a gain by up to 12% and 10% in energy efficiency and communication fairness, respectively, compared to best-performing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Abstract The growing ubiquity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices within smart homes demands the use of advanced strategies in IoT implementation, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and security. The incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the IoT framework improves the overall efficiency of the network. An inefficient mechanism of parent selection at the network layer of IoT causes energy drain in the nodes, particularly near the sink node. As a result, nodes die earlier, causing network holes that further increase the control message overhead as well as the energy consumption of the network, compromising network security. This research introduces an AI‐based approach to parent selection of the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy networks (RPL) at the network layer of IoT to enhance security and energy efficiency. A novel objective function, named Energy and Parent Load Objective Function (EA‐EPL), is also proposed that considers the composite metrics, including energy and parent load. Extensive experiments are conducted to assess EA‐EPL against OF0 and MRHOF algorithms. Experimental results show that EA‐EPL outperformed these algorithms in improving energy efficiency, network stability, and packet delivery ratio. The results also demonstrate a significant enhancement in the overall efficiency of IoT networks and increased security in smart home environments.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with the Sixth-generation ($\mathbf{6 G}$) framework poses significant challenges to low-latency applications. Recently, semantic communication has emerged as a promising technique for future intelligent applications. However, the resource management problem combined with semantics is not fully explored. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning-based twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) for task-centered semantic communication. The proposed TD3 algorithm optimizes bandwidth, and semantic information and prioritizes data with maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the efficient transmission of useful information. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TD3 scheme compared to state-of-the-art work in terms of transmission efficiency by up to $36 \%$ for varying users and up to $33 \%$ for varying SNR.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been adopted in various applications, including agriculture, public safety, surveillance, and crucial military missions. However, alongside their advantageous nature, UAVs have also been employed for malicious activities, leading to an increased requirement for timely detection and identification. Despite significant progress in UAV detection, challenges persist, particularly concerning various types of UAVs, the payload carried by UAVs, and the traits of their flight. Employing single machine learning for detection and identification has limitations due to the inability to handle diverse datasets and acquire complex relationships. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel integration of the Visual Geometry Group-based convolutional neural network (VGG-CNN) framework employed for detection with the Mask Region-based convolutional neural network (MR-CNN) for identification of UAVs (jointly termed MR-DCNN). For efficient deployment of MR-DCNN, we add diversity to the dataset by performing data augmentation of new images in the training dataset for the detection of various types of UAVs, payload categories, and flight characteristics. The performance evaluation of the MR-DCNN approach was conducted via simulations, revealing superior detection capabilities for malicious UAVs compared to existing methods.

Multihop communication has gained prominence within the realm of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) owing to its exceptional reliability amidst the challenges posed by the underwater acoustic environment. Despite this, the persistence of limitations caused by propagation delay, high collision rate, and limited energy in underwater communication remains, representing the most formidable hurdles in ensuring the successful transmission of data gathered by sensor nodes. To address these challenges, we employ a machine learning (ML)-based optimal cooperating node selection for each hop, considering the Shortest propagation delay, minimal residual Energy, and a low Collision rate (referred to as SEC). For this purpose, we initially assemble the sensor nodes to create a list of cooperative nodes, considering the aspect of SEC. Then, using an assembled list of cooperating sensor nodes, we employ ML-based algorithms, such as reinforcement learning (RL-SEC), deep Q-networks (DQN-SEC), and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG-SEC), to predict the optimal cooperating node for each hop. The simulation results of the DDPG-SEC demonstrate a significant improvement of approximately 56% when compared with RL-SEC, DQN-SEC, and other state-of-the-art techniques.

According to research, the vast majority of road accidents (90%) are the result of human error, with only a small percentage (2%) being caused by malfunctions in the vehicle. Smart vehicles have gained significant attention as potential solutions to address such issues. In the future of transportation, travel comfort and road safety will be ensured while also offering several value-added services. The automotive industry has undergone a significant transformation through the use of emerging technologies and wireless communication channels, resulting in vehicles becoming more interconnected, intelligent, and safe. However, these technologies and communication systems are susceptible to numerous security attacks. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the smart vehicle’s architecture, encompassing emerging technologies and security challenges and solutions associated with smart vehicles. There has been a significant surge in the utilization of machine learning techniques in smart vehicles. We categorically discuss common security measures, including machine learning and deep learning based solutions that have been mentioned in the literature and implemented against security threats on smart vehicles. This paper has also been titled a tutorial due to its layout, which begins with covering preliminary knowledge, terminologies, and encompassing technologies required to comprehend smart vehicles. Following this, the paper addresses the overall challenges associated with smart vehicles and then focuses on security issues. In terms of solutions, the paper discusses overall solutions to security issues in smart vehicles before delving into a specific solution based on machine learning and deep learning.

In this paper, we propose a multi-band medium access control (MAC) protocol for an infrastructure-based network with an access point (AP) that supports In-Band full-duplex (IBFD) and multiuser transmission to multi-band-enabled stations. The Multi-Band Full Duplex MAC (MB-FDMAC) protocol mainly uses the sub-6 GHz band for control-frame exchange, transmitted at the lowest rate per IEEE 802.11 standards, and uses the 60 GHz band, which has significantly higher instantaneous bandwidth, exclusively for data-frame exchange. We also propose a selection method that ensures fairness among uplink and downlink stations. Our result shows that MB-FDMAC effectively improves the spectral efficiency in the mmWave band by 324%, 234%, and 189% compared with state-of-the-art MAC protocols. In addition, MB-FDMAC significantly outperforms the combined throughput of sub-6 GHz and 60 GHz IBFD multiuser MIMO networks that operate independently by more than 85%. In addition, we study multiple network variables such as the number of stations in the network, the percentage of mmWave band stations, the size of the contention stage, and the selection method on MB-FDMAC by evaluating the change in the throughput, packet delay, and fairness among stations. Finally, we propose a method to improve the utilization of the high bandwidth of the mmWave band by incorporating time duplexing into MB-FDMAC, which we show can enhance the fairness by 12.5 % and significantly reduces packet delay by 80%.

In this paper, we investigate the user selection techniques for an in-band full-duplex access point that simultaneously transmits and receives data from multiple users for the next-generation wireless local area network. Then, we propose a throughput-fairness tradeoff selection algorithm to enable the AP to maximize the throughput with a maintainable fairness level. In addition, we propose a throughput-fairness medium access control (TFMAC) based on the 802.11 standards to accommodate the requirements of the proposed selection algorithm and support legacy nodes. Our simulation results show that TFMAC improves the throughput compared to multiple state-of-the-art benchmarks while maintaining the desired fairness levels. Also, we study the interplay between the throughput, the uplink fairness, and the downlink fairness for the operation of TFMAC. Finally, we discuss the complexity of the proposed scheme.

A new medium access control (MAC) protocol for full-duplex multiuser multi input multi output (FD-MUMAC) is proposed. FD-MUMAC is an 802.11 infrastructure-based MAC protocol where the communication in the network is moderated by a full-duplex access point (AP) that can handle multiple simultaneous uplink and downlink streams from half-duplex users. FD-MUMAC is the first MAC protocol that jointly determines the selection of uplink and downlink users and controls the transmission rate by considering transmit and receive beamforming, channel states, and multiuser-interferences. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed protocol, we introduce a joint fairness selection algorithm that ensures that each user obtains a fair allocation of time to utilize the channel and balances its traffic between the uplink and downlink directions. In one specific instantiation, FD-MUMAC achieves a throughput gain of 59%, 177% and 94% compared with a single antenna FD MAC protocol and two half-duplex MU-MIMO protocols, respectively.