The Internet of Drones (IoD) has become increasingly important in applications such as forest inventory, leveraging advanced sensors and internet connectivity to enable efficient data collection. Compared to traditional methods, IoD offers superior cost-effectiveness. However, its reliance on public channels, unreliable connectivity, and dynamic environments poses significant security and privacy challenges. Safeguarding forest inventory data is essential to maintaining accuracy, preventing unauthorized access, and mitigating the risk of data manipulation, which can lead to suboptimal management decisions. To address these concerns, it is essential to design a lightweight authentication protocol that secures IoD communication, accounts for network bandwidth limitations and scalability, and supports integration with emerging technologies. This manuscript introduces a new Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol specifically designed for the Internet of Drones (IoD), leveraging asymmetric cryptography and aggregate signatures to enhance security and privacy in forest inventories with fog computing. Its robustness was confirmed through informal and formal security analyses by the AVISPA tool and the ROR model, demonstrating resistance to known attacks and superior communication, computational, and energy performance compared to existing protocols.

The Ever-Increasing evolution of technologies in communication, artificial intelligence (AI), manufacturing, etc., is promoting a new wave of industrial revolution. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been considered as a critical stimulator for both science and economics by amounts of countries.

Inadequate authentication processes constitute a major security flaw in several applications. In mobile healthcare, they can lead to patients not receiving proper attention, or to delays that might result in death. Towards a safe and fast authentication with little or no user intervention, modern systems have explored physiological traits for biometric recognition, among which electrocardiography (ECG) signals offer some important advantages, including subject specificity and pattern robustness with no conscious effort or behavioral change. This paper explores ensembles for the classification of ECG signals for authentication. Given its robustness to dataset imbalances, Random Under-Sampling Boosting (RUSBoost) strategy, not yet explored for such an application, to the best of our knowledge, was applied. Its performance was compared with that of Nearest Neighbour Search, which is the basis of some previous efforts. A cross-validation procedure, used for the comparison, employed random subsampling to define the training and testing datasets, and three objective metrics, namely accuracy, sensitivity, and F1-score were considered. The results indicated a better performance of RUSBoost regarding accuracy (97.4%), sensitivity (96.1%) and F1-score (97.4%).

In vehicular ad-hoc networks for electric vehicles (EV), the possibility of charging EVs while driving (CWD) with the use of wireless power transfer (WPT) technology offers advantages such as optimization of travel time and greater comfort for travelers. On the other hand, the privacy, confidentiality and integrity of the users' information must be guaranteed for preventing security attacks (e.g., Man-in-the-Middle and Denial-of-service (DoS)). This article presents a new authentication protocol that uses a chaotic map-based cryptosystem for key generation, validation, and key distribution in a cloud-based CWD-WPT loading station. The composite protocol ensures mutual authentication between the recharge system and the EV, as well as privacy and anonymity of users with excellent performance in terms of communication and computational costs, and resistance to attacks.

Relay-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communication serves users at the edge of system coverage of 5G networks, enabling communication among sensors and patients’ mobile devices, and improving spectral and power efficiency. The security of D2D-based m-health applications requires attention due to the delicacy of the data treated in the collection, transmission, and storage of information on patients, whose devices must be adequately authenticated. However, traditional authentication and key agreement schemes are not suitable for D2D scenarios, since they might expose patients to security vulnerabilities and lead to an excessive use of resources. This article proposes a secure and lightweight scheme based on Shamir secret sharing for the mutual authentication of m-health devices in relay-assisted D2D communications, which provides security robustness and reduces resources (energy, processing) consumption. The manuscript also addresses the trustworthiness of devices involved in data relay and device discovery procedures.

This paper presents an architecture for live streaming of scalable video, which is encoded using the H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Coding) standard and transmitted over multicast groups on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The architecture has two characteristics: 1) the utilization of a paradigm of video compression based on independent compressed blocks in order to minimize some of the practical difficulties of the decoding process of the H.264 SVC when it is transmitted in real time over unreliable channel; 2) bitstream adaptivity through dynamic quality adjustment of the video blocks on an Internet best-effort environment, leading to a significative improvement in the quality of received video sequences.

One of the main challenges of the Brazilian Government for the next 10 years will be the banking inclusion of the poorest portion of the population, which has a monthly family income of less than $200 Dollars. Only 25% of the economically active population have a bank account and 15% are digitally included. On the other hand more than 90% of Brazilian people have a TV, and only 12% are connected to the internet. These aspects have lead to the use of digital television as an innovative and effective way for banking inclusion, thus significantly improving statistics related to digital and social inclusion, allowing many people to be able to get micro credit programs and enjoy more benefits of been citizens. The Brazilian Digital Television System recently developed and established in some cities, would offer interactivity capabilities, thus promoting a progressive alteration of paradigm in the relationship involved between the user and the television system. For an adequate implantation of interactive applications, the use of several options available as last mile technologies for the return channel needs to be evaluated. Emphasizing the needs and specific characteristics of T-banking for people not connected to the internet, this article aims at discussing several possibilities of access technologies,involving power line communications, cellular networks, xDSL and others, for the sake of adequate communication when using the return channel of digital television system.

Channel allocation has been considered a NP-complete problem, and involves a very important issue for the adequate dimensioning of wireless communication networks. One of the possibilities for its solution involves the utilization of heuristics, able to produce near optimal solutions in an acceptable computational time. In this paper, a hybrid of GRASP (greedy randomized adaptive search procedure) and FEA (frequency exhaustive assignment) is proposed, allowing the achievement of best solutions for the channel allocation problem (CAP).

A priority-based multiple access with dynamic permission (PBMA DP) scheme is proposed in order to serve voice and data traffic for cellular networks and wireless PCS. Reservation and contention processes are considered. For the contention process, estimation of the number of contending terminals is obtained in an original way. Simulation results to voice, low delay data and high delay data are presented with respect to QoS requirements, such as: packet dropping probability, mean access delay and channel utilization. We observe that the scheme guarantees maximum priority to voice traffic as well as good channel utilization.