Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will play a vital role in the operation, management and service provisioning process of Next-Generation Networks (NGNs). Given that the Sixth Generation (6G) network is an AI-native cooperative ecosystem that relies on the resource and intelligent capabilities of every layer of the network, especially edge devices, UAVs are thus critical and a key player in 6G. This paper presents a UAVsupported framework for 6G that relies on a multi-tiered approach to guarantee autonomous and optimal network coverage and bandwidth. The UAV network adapts Federated Learning (FL) to maintain self-organization and support for real-time edge processing. The multi-tiered UAV network approach uses realtime adjustments in swarm membership and task allocation to enhance the network energy consumption. Blockchain is integrated into each swarm to maintain the integrity of the trained models, and provides a decentralized device authentication and swarm coordination mechanism. System evaluations reveal that the proposed framework provides high levels of task completion ratio and learning accuracy.

The Sixth Generation (6G) network is a cooperative network that relies on the capabilities of edge and end-devices. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) will play a significant role in this cooperative environment, by enabling aerial connectivity, high-speed data transmission, and network densification for both ground and aerial users. Such a cooperative non-conventional network infrastructure, especially with a one that relies on UAV swarms, cannot adopt conventional centralized intrusion detection and prevention systems. This paper presents a new framework that integrates the Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) into 6G networks to secure UAV communication. Contrary to the conventional ZTA, the proposed framework adapts a trust mechanism suitable for decentralized networks that maintains the security, privacy and authenticity of both UAV devices and their metaverse counterparts. A Federated Learning (FL) approach is adopted on UAV devices to support accurate and on-time decision making. Learnt models and trust scores are added onto a blockchain to support the ZTA. Experimental results reveal that the proposed architecture can maintain high levels of intrusion prevention and authenticity for UAVs.

Through the digitization of essential functional processes, Industry 4.0 aims to build knowledgeable, networked, and stable value chains. Network trustworthiness is a critical component of network security that is built on positive interactions, guarantees, transparency, and accountability. Blockchain technology has drawn the attention of researchers in various fields of data science as a safe and low-cost platform to track a large number of eventual transactions. Such a technique is adaptable to the renewable energy-trade sector, which suffers from security and trustworthy issues. Having a decentralized energy infrastructure, that is supported by blockchain and artificial intelligence, enables smart and secure microgrid energy trading. The new age of industrial production will be highly versatile in terms of production volume and customization. As such a robust collaboration solution between consumers, businesses, and suppliers must be both secure and sustainable. In this article, we introduce a cooperative and distributed framework that relies on computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities of edge and end devices to enable secure energy trading, remote monitoring, and network trustworthiness. The blockchain and federated learning-enabled solution provide secure energy trading between different critical entities. Such a technique, coupled with 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass surveillance, monitoring, and analysis to occur at the edge. Performance evaluations are conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of reliability and responsiveness in a vehicular network energy-trade scenario.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the manufacturing process in the industry. It has created a new ecosystem allowing a diversified set of devices to be controlled remotely with minimal human intervention. Today, with the advances in intelligence, processing, storage, communication, and networking capabilities of IoT devices, we are one step closer to realizing the vision of Industry 4.0. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are now significantly more intelligent and automated with the aid of advances in Machine Learning (ML). Intelligent IoT (IIoT), Digital Twins (DT) and the advances in mobile networks are now paving the path towards decentralized self-managed CPS in the industry. DT permits mobile networks to provide adaptive and dynamic configurations for cooperative CPS. Moreover, trustworthy cooperation may be realized with blockchain. In this article, we present a blockchain-assisted hierarchical federated learning (FL)-enabled platform (HFL) for Industry 4.0. The solution integrates DT into CPS to accurately capture the characteristics of industrial IoT devices and assist in the HFL process. A two-stage FL algorithm is used that groups Internet-enabled factory machinery and their DTs into groups in accordance with their organizational structure. A global model is created for the groups from the averaged local models and the DT model in the first stage. During the second stage, federated aggregation is used to create a global model from the first-stage models. Blockchain is used to cross-verify and validate newly added blocks with the support of validator nodes. Numerical analysis is performed to compare between the presented DT-enabled and blockchain-assisted HFL solution and benchmark solutions in terms of network overhead, block optimization, and accuracy.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revamped service-oriented architectures by enabling edge-based devices to collect and share information that is vital for the service provisioning process. IoT devices have evolved from simple data acquirers and have become part of the service provisioning process. These devices are now able to sense, acquire, communicate, and process data in an intelligent manner. With the support of Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT devices can now support users with minimal reliance on centralized entities, such as the Cloud. IoT devices are now able to share raw and processed information securely, without or with minimal reliance on centralized devices. This paper proposes a general framework for Health 4.0 to provide edge-based health services with the support of AI. IoT devices collect and share patient information in a secure manner to enable user-side disease diagnosis. The solution enables both federated and centralized learning to coexist under one framework. As a proof-of-concept, the solution considers a COVID-19 diagnosis use-case. A Machine Learning (ML) web-based user application is developed to analyze frontal chest X-ray (CXR) images and make predictions on whether patients' lungs are damaged. The solution provides an experimental study on mechanisms and approaches needed to increase learning accuracy with reduced dataset sizes and image quality through Federated Learning (FL).

The advancements of Edge and Internet of Things (IoT) devices in terms of their processing, storage and communication capabilities, in addition to the advancements in wireless communication and networking technologies, have led to the rise in Intelligent Edge-enabled IoT architectures. Federated Learning (FL) is one example in which intelligence is adapted to the edge to offload some of the processing load from centralized entities and maintain secure localized model training. With Health 4.0, it is anticipated that distributed and edge-supported Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable faster and more accurate early-stage disease discovery that relies significantly on intelligent remote and on-site IoT devices. Given that healthcare systems are highly scrutinized by both governments and patients to maintain high levels of data privacy and security, FL coupled with the support of blockchain will provide an optimal solution to reinforce today's healthcare frameworks. In this paper, we propose a FL-enabled framework for healthcare systems that is supported by edge-computing, blockchain and intelligent IoT devices. The solution considers a pneumonia detection use-case as a proof-of-concept and is applicable to an extended set of health-related use-cases. Different pre-trained models are compared against the proposed FL-supported model, namely, CNN, GG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet, DenseNet, and Xception. Results show high model accuracy attainment and significant improvements in terms of data privacy.

Network trustworthiness is considered a very crucial element in network security and is developed through positive experiences, guarantees, clarity, and responsibility. Trustworthiness becomes even more compelling with the ever-expanding set of Internet of Things (IoT) smart city services and applications. Most of today’s network trustworthy solutions are considered inadequate, notably for critical applications where IoT devices may be exposed and easily compromised. In this article, we propose an adaptive framework that integrates both federated learning and blockchain to achieve both network trustworthiness and security. The solution is capable of dealing with individuals’ trust as a probability and estimates the end devices’ trust values belonging to different networks subject to achieving security criteria. We evaluate and verify the proposed model through simulation to showcase the effectiveness of the framework in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and trust using multiple factors. Results show that the proposed model maintains high accuracy and detection rates with values of$\approx 0.93$and$\approx 0.96$, respectively.

The aerial capabilities and flexibility in movement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has enabled them to adaptively provide both traditional and more contemporary services. In this article, we introduce a solution that integrates the capabilities of both UAVs and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) to provide both intelligent connectivity and services to both aerial and ground connected devices. A cooperative solution is adopted that considers nodes’ power and movement constraints. The UAV and UGV cooperative process ensures continuous power availability to UAVs to support seamless and continuous service availability to end-devices. A Federated Learning (FL) approach is adopted at the edge to ensure accurate and up-to-date service provisioning in accordance with the surrounding environment and network constraints. Moreover, Blockchain technology is used to decentralize the provisioning and control aspects, and ensure authenticity and integrity. Extensive simulations are conducted to test the soundness and applicability of the proposed solution. Results show significant improvement in terms of connectivity, service availability, and UAV energy enhancements when compared to traditional mobile and vehicular communication techniques.

The shift towards Industry 4.0 has seen significant steps forward with the advancements in processing, communication, and storage capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have become more intelligent and withhold advanced processing, storage, and communication capabilities. Rejuvenated network and service management architectures must incorporate the capabilities of intelligent CPS. With that said, this article introduces a cooperative blockchain (BC)-assisted resource and capability sharing approach to fulfill CPS tasks. The solution uses Federated Learning (FL)-enabled Intelligent IoT (IIoT) devices to support Next-Generation Networks (NGNs). A clustering multi-stage blockchain and FL algorithm is used to create local and global models for CPS tasks. Local models are created for each cluster during the first stage. At the second stage, Federated Averaging is used by fog devices to create fog models. A global deep model is then created on the cloud using Federated Aggregation. Blockchain is used to record and validate the added models and ensure that records are not altered under cyber-attacks. Simulation results have shown that the proposed solution outperforms conventional FL and blockchain approaches in terms of accuracy and delay tolerance.

Advanced services leveraged for future smart cities have played a significant role in the advancement of 5G networks towards the 6G vision. Interactive immersive applications are an example of those enabled services. Such applications allow for the interaction between multiple users in a 3D environment created by virtual presentations of real objects and participants using various technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Extended Reality (XR), Digital Twin (DT) and holography. These applications require advanced computing models which allow for the processing of massive gathered amounts of data. Motions, gestures and object modification should be captured, added to the virtual environment, and shared with all the participants. Relying only on the cloud to process this data can cause significant delays. Therefore, a hybrid cloud/edge architecturewith an intelligent resource orchestration mechanism, that is able to allocate the available capacities efficiently is necessary. In this paper, a blockchain and federated learning-enabled predicted edge-resource allocation (FLP-RA) algorithm is introduced to manage the allocation of computing resources in B5G networks. It allows for smart edge nodes to train their local data and share it with other nodes to create a global estimation of future network loads. As such, nodes are able to make accurate decisions to distribute the available resources to provide the lowest computing delay.

The Fifth Generation (5G) communication technology has paved the way for intelligent and diversified Internet of Connected Vehicles (IoCV) services that meet stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain are playing and will continue to play an imperative role in providing secure and decentralized resource sharing to solve complex and time-sensitive problems at the edge. The integration of both those techniques will enhance the performance of smart vehicular services, especially in beyond 5G (B5G) networks. Ensuring secure transactions in complex autonomous network architectures is an immense challenge. This article addresses computational, storage, connectivity and intelligence concerns using a collaborative approach to engage multiple Internet of Things (IoT) nodes such as connected- vehicles, drones and mobile devices for the provisioning of QoS-optimal complex service compositions in autonomous mobile networks. Continuous and fast compositions emerge using decentralized decisions and interactions with diversified neighboring nodes with the aid of reinforcement learning. Blockchain is used to ensure that nodes interact with each other verifiably and record transactions without the need for trusted intermediaries. We assess whether having an AI-enabled blockchain collaborative composition solution improves service availability and delivery of smart city vehicular services.

The rise of fast communication media both at the core and at the edge has resulted in unprecedented numbers of sophisticated and intelligent wireless IoT devices. Tactile Internet has enabled the interaction between humans and machines within their environment to achieve revolutionized solutions both on the move and in real-time. Many applications such as intelligent autonomous self-driving, smart agriculture and industrial solutions, and self-learning multimedia content filtering and sharing have become attainable through cooperative, distributed, and decentralized systems, namely, volunteer computing. This article introduces a blockchain-enabled resource sharing and service composition solution through volunteer computing. Device resource, computing, and intelligence capabilities are advertised in the environment to be made discoverable and available for sharing with the aid of blockchain technology. Incentives in the form of on-demand service availability are given to resource and service providers to ensure fair and balanced cooperative resource usage. Blockchains are formed whenever a service request is initiated with the aid of fog and mobile edge computing (MEC) devices to ensure secure communication and service delivery for the participants. Using both volunteer computing techniques and tactile internet architectures, we devise a fast and reliable service provisioning framework that relies on a reinforcement learning technique. Simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve high reward distribution, increased number of blockchain formations, reduced delays, and balanced resource usage among participants, under the premise of high IoT device availability.

The advances in today's IoT devices and machine learning methods have given rise to the concept of Federated Learning. Through such a technique, a plethora of network devices collaboratively train and update a mutual machine learning model while protecting their individual data-sets. Federated learning proves its effectiveness in tackling communication efficiency and privacy-safeguarding issues. Moreover, blockchain was introduced to solve many network issues in regard to data privacy and network single point of failure. In this article, we introduce a solution that integrates both federated learning and blockchain to ensure both data privacy and network security. We present a framework to decentralize the mutual machine learning models on end-devices. A blockchain-based consensus solution as a second line of privacy is used to ensure trustworthy shared training on the fog. The proposed model enables on-end device machine learning without any centralized training of the data nor coordination by utilizing a consensus method in the blockchain. We evaluate and verify our proposed model through simulation to showcase the effectiveness of the adapted scheme in terms of accuracy, energy consumption, and lifetime rate, along with throughput and latency metrics. The proposed model performs with an accuracy rate of ≈ 0.97.

Diversified Internet of Things services are becoming more complex and strictly user-defined. Traditional cloud solutions proved to be both costly in terms of resources and time efficiency. To overcome such a burden, researchers developed fog solutions for faster service responsiveness. Fog-to-Fog communication and cooperation was then introduced to compose services on-the-go for user-specific requests with the aid of mobile edge devices. This paper introduces a blockchain-based decentralized service composition solution for complex multimedia service delivery to cloud subscribers. The proposed work dynamically creates user-defined services without requiring any intermediary service or network provider entities to authenticate and deliver composite services. The composition process uses a reinforcement learning technique to construct secure and reliable composition paths. Participants are rewarded by cloud and fog entities for solving complex composition processes. Simulation results conducted on the system show that by adapting the proposed technique, fog and cloud entities require less resources and reduced power usage with increased service delivery success rates to cloud subscribers.

Connected and Autonomous Electric Vehicles (CAEVs) are becoming a feature of our roads in the imminent future. This disruptive technology is likely to enhance the way we get around the city in many ways by collecting accurate data in regards to the surrounding environment and events in a timely-manner. As such data that is time-sensitive where human life may be at risk requires reliable and on-time data delivery. In crowded dense environments, several issues can reduce the network performance due to the high density of objects such as skyscrapers and vehicles as well as the large number of exchanged data between connected vehicles and other objects on the road. Involving a swarm of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), namely drones, would enhance network connectivity, reduce CAEVs communication delay, facilitate CAEVs tasks distribution, and elevate provisioning services. In this paper, a routing scheme in an autonomous UAV-connected vehicles network is proposed that provides reduced communication delay. The proposed solution has been evaluated using simulations. The collected results show the feasibility and the advantage of the UAV-assisted connected vehicle network in meeting delay and energy consumption requirements.

Fog-to-fog communication has been introduced to deliver services to clients with minimal reliance on the cloud through resource and capability sharing of cooperative fogs. Current solutions assume full cooperation among the fogs to deliver simple and composite services. Realistically, each fog might belong to a different network operator or service provider and thus will not participate in any form of collaboration unless self-monetary profit is incurred. In this paper, we introduce a fog collaboration approach for simple and complex multimedia service delivery to cloud subscribers while achieving shared profit gains for the cooperating fogs. The proposed work dynamically creates short-term service-level agreements (SLAs) offered to cloud subscribers for service delivery while maximizing user satisfaction and fog profit gains. The solution provides a learning mechanism that relies on online and offline simulation results to build guaranteed workflows for new service requests. The configuration parameters of the short-term SLAs are obtained using a modified tabu-based search mechanism that uses previous solutions when selecting new optimal choices. Performance evaluation results demonstrate significant gains in terms of service delivery success rate, service quality, reduced power consumption for fog and cloud datacenters, and increased fog profits.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Network Slicing techniques have a potential to augment 5G-IoT network services. Telecommunication operators use a diverse set of radio access technologies to provide services for users. Mobility management is one such service that needs attention for new 5G deployments. The QoS requirements in 5G networks are user specific. Network slicing along with MEC has been promoted as a key enabler for such on-demand service schemes. This paper focuses on radio resource access across heterogeneous networks for mobile roaming users. A unified service architecture is proposed enabling seamless handover between a 5G (New Generation Core) service and a 4G (Evolved Packet Core) service via the network slicing paradigm. An identifier-locator (I-L) concept that allows active source-IP sessions is used to handle the seamless hand-over. Signaling costs, service disruptions and other resource reservation requirements are considered in the evaluation to assure that profit for mobile edge operators is achieved. Simulation experiments are considered to provide performance comparisons against the state-of-the-art Distributed Mobility Management Protocol (DMM).

The significant advancements achieved in wireless communications over the past few years has facilitated successful deployment of LTE-A, and heralded great efforts in 5G development. However, with the increase in the number and variety of connected devices, wireless video transmission in real-time is challenging for the aforementioned network paradigm. Many studies have shown that the centric focus of communications should be the content type, rather than the communication itself, which means real-time multimedia communications are considered crucial for future Internet architectures. This requires high capacity channels and techniques to mitigate inherent wireless channel errors. Thus, we propose an application-layer and middleware-based solutions that increase network reliability and flexibility and provide Quality of Service (QoS) control based on Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Due to the real-time and QoS support of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware, it can be used to implement the three types of SVC scalability: Viz. Temporal, Spatial, Quality (SNR). The open source Scalable Video-streaming Evaluation Framework (SVEF) tool has been used to assess the video transmission performance with performance metrics, Viz. Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Opinion Score (MOS), and frame delay. The results showed a graceful degradation of video quality when using the DDS-based SVC, particularly when the number of receivers is increased. The acquired results show excellent improvements which can be applied to different Future Internet architectures.

The Smart City vision is to improve quality of life and efficiency of urban operations and services while meeting economic, social, and environmental needs of its dwellers. Realizing this vision requires cities to make significant investments in all kinds of smart objects. Recently, the concept of smart vehicle has also emerged as a viable solution for various pressing problems such as traffic management, drivers' comfort, road safety and on-demand provisioning services. With the availability of onboard vehicular services, these vehicles will be a constructive key enabler of smart cities. Smart vehicles are capable of sharing and storing digital content, sensing and monitoring its surroundings, and mobilizing on-demand services. However, the provisioning of these services is challenging due to different ownerships, costs, demand levels, and rewards. In this paper, we present the concept of Smart Vehicle as a Service (SVaaS) to provide continuous vehicular services in smart cities. The solution relies on a location prediction mechanism to determine a vehicle's future location. Once a vehicle's predicted location is determined, a Quality of Experience (QoE) based service selection mechanism is used to select services that are needed before the vehicle's arrival. We provide simulation results to show that our approach can adequately establish vehicular services in a timely and efficient manner. It also shows that the number of utilized services have been doubled when prediction and service discovery is applied.

As an emergent technology the IoT promises to harness the computational and data resources distributed across different remote clouds. Fog computing extends cloud computing by bringing the network and cloud resources closer to the network edge. As the number of resources contributing to the cloud/fog system grows, so the problems associated with efficient and effective resource selection and allocation. In this paper, we introduce a fog-to-fog (F2F) data caching and selection method, which allows IoT devices to retrieve data in a faster and more efficient way. The proposed solution is based on a data caching and selection strategy using a multi-agent cooperation framework. Caching is achieved by decomposing cloud data into a set of files and then placed into fog storage sites. The selection process is based on a run-time file location prediction technique, which collects and maintains a repository of fog data in the form of log files. When data needs to be retrieved, prediction is made with the aid of these logs and previous successful search queries resulting in realistic run-time location estimates as well as best fog selection. Simulation results showcase the reduced data retrieval latency that enable tactile Internet in 5G. Additionally, results show increased successful file hit ratio leading to a reduced number of repeated downloads.

Content delivery through cloud networks has gained popularity due to its effectiveness and reliability. Much progress has been made to allow for the easy integration of heterogeneous systems to compose services on the fly. Despite all efforts, the task of fast service composition has made the assumption of the presence of static searchable and updatable central repositories within cloud data centers. With today's dynamic and mobile environments, service providers' movements are unpredictable, thus a rejuvenated service composition mechanism for cloud environments is needed. This paper presents a cloudlet-supported service composition solution in cloud networks that can find a suitable mechanism to discover mobile media processing functions and seamlessly integrate them into media delivery sessions. Furthermore, the established sessions are monitored by a novel client-side QoS measurement collection mechanism and adapted dynamically to network, user, and service providers' changing conditions. Simulation results showcase the effectiveness of the presented solution in terms of composed service stability and QoS measurement collection accuracy.

This paper presents a novel distributed Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring scheme for cellular data networks serving highly dynamic users with power- limited devices. The proposed scheme relies on candidate QoS monitoring users that can efficiently submit QoS related measurements on behalf of their neighbors. These candidate users are chosen according to their devices' residual power and transmission capabilities and their estimated remaining service lifetime. Service monitoring users are then selected from these candidates using a novel user-to-user semantic similarity matching algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the significant gains achieved by the proposed scheme in terms of the reduced traffic overhead and overall consumed users' devices power while achieving a high monitoring accuracy.

With the increase in the number of mobile devices and the emergence of a plethora of cloud services, mobile cloud computing users require reliable and continuous access to data from cloud service providers. To support such continuous data access, we propose a location prediction method that provides a mechanism for identifying potential high user density locations. A partial data replication algorithm is used to exclusively replicate user requested data within third party cloud servers in advance. The proposed method aims to minimize the data access time, which is particularly subject to the location of the cloud server and the network bandwidth. Simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system for data access and replication.

Context based dynamic adaptation of autonomous services and applications require the acquisition of an array of contextual information. Context dissemination mechanisms may result in network flooding, unrestricted access to private context information, and the inability of consumers to limit or personalize received context. Adapting context information disseminated to users is linked to direct contextual requests made by users. This paper describes policy- and ontology-based, context-aware system architecture. A Context Level Agreements is proposed to help deliver contextual information to users according to their needs. The paper illustrates use of the negotiation protocol through design and implementation of context-aware system architecture capable of acquiring, modeling, reasoning and disseminating context through ontologies.