ABSTRACT Freshness is a core quality indicator that determines the utilisation and commercial value of fish products. Traditional fish freshness detection methods are highly subjective and destructive, while existing neural network models suffer from low detection accuracy, unsatisfactory recall and confidence scores and limited generalisation ability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel Dual‐Sensitive Convolutional Neural Network (S‐CNN), where the letter ‘S’ stands for Sensitive. The model simultaneously extracts and fuses discriminative features from fish eye and gill images, capturing subtle freshness differences through a dual‐sensitive feature extraction mechanism. In data preprocessing, all image pixels are normalised to the range [0, 1] to unify numerical scales, stabilise gradient descent and mitigate overfitting. The proposed S‐CNN is composed of seven convolutional blocks, each equipped with batch normalisation, L2 regularisation and a pooling layer; the pooling operation is omitted in the last block to avoid excessive dimensionality reduction. After the flatten layer, a Dropout regularisation module is adopted, and L2 regularisation is applied to all convolutional and fully connected layers. The network uses categorical crossentropy as the loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that the S‐CNN achieves a detection accuracy of 98.70% and an average confidence score of 99.18% on the fish freshness dataset, outperforming other comparative models. The results confirm that the fusion of fish eye and gill features can effectively evaluate fish freshness, providing a reliable method for nondestructive detection and quality assessment of fish products.

As touchless interaction becomes increasingly important in wearable and ambient computing, gesture-based air handwriting offers a promising input modality, particularly for low-power embedded devices. While vision-based and radar-based systems have achieved high accuracy in gesture recognition, they are often unsuitable for deployment on microcontrollers due to their computational and energy demands. In contrast, IMU-based systems provide a lightweight and privacy-preserving alternative, yet existing research rarely addresses full alphabet recognition or deployment-ready pipelines for resource-constrained environments. This paper proposes a complete TinyML pipeline for inertial-based air handwriting recognition of English alphabets, integrating structured preprocessing of raw IMU data into 2D rasterized gesture images, followed by training and deployment of four lightweight deep learning models: SqueezeNet, EfficientNet-Lite0, ShuffleNetV2, and FastKAN. The models are evaluated under a unified training configuration and subjected to compression techniques including quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Among them, FastKAN demonstrates significant superiority, achieving a test accuracy of 97.4% with a minimal model size of 120 KB and energy consumption as low as 0.0011J per inference after hybrid compression. This work explicitly targets isolated characters (A–Z, a–z); continuous handwriting and word-level recognition are out of scope and left for future work. Extensive evaluations, including confusion matrix analysis, compression benchmarking, and successful deployment on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, demonstrate the practicality, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system for real-time TinyML-based handwriting recognition applications.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a highly promising approach for achieving low-latency and high-performance computing services for mobile users. However, traditional MEC systems face challenges in meeting the increasing demands of mobile users due to the limited coverage and flexibility of fixed MEC servers. Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with MEC has gained significant attention as a promising way to improve the MEC networks’ performances and meet the demands of next-generation networks. UAVs can act as flying edge servers, providing mobile users with flexible and on-demand computing resources. This article shows a new way to use the grey wolf optimizer (JDTS-GWO) algorithm to improve both the placement of UAVs and the scheduling of tasks in a multi-UAV MEC system. The objective is to minimize the overall system’s energy consumption while meeting various constraints, such as UAV coverage, collision avoidance, and task execution requirements. The proposed approach formulates the joint optimization approach, considering the deployment of UAVs, offloading decisions, and resource allocation. An encoding scheme is proposed to represent UAV deployment and task allocation within the JDTS-GWO framework. Simulations demonstrate significant improvements in energy efficiency and task completion compared to existing benchmarks, with up to 35% energy savings and a 98% task completion rate. Sensitivity analysis confirms the approach’s scalability and robustness. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, taking into account the consumed energy of mobile nodes, UAVs, and the MEC system. The JDTS-GWO algorithm is adapted to solve the optimization problem efficiently.

The integration of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) with Human Behavior Analysis (HBA) represents a significant advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling real-time, efficient, and privacy-preserving analysis on resource-constrained devices. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey exploring this integration, presenting a detailed overview of TinyML, including its definitions, key concepts and advantages. The survey proposes a systematic taxonomy of TinyML applications in HBA, categorizing state-of-the-art implementations based on their use cases and specific methodologies. Furthermore, the challenges and limitations of integrating TinyML in HBA are thoroughly discussed, including technical constraints, data quality issues, and ethical considerations. Finally, future research directions and open issues are outlined, emphasizing the potential advancements and emerging trends in this field. This survey serves as a foundational resource, guiding researchers and practitioners in harnessing the capabilities of TinyML to advance HBA.

With the rapid advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, efficient and secure communication is considered a challenging task. Symmetric authenticated key exchange (AKE) is a promising solution due to its lightweight design. However, existing studies have demonstrated that traditional symmetric AKE schemes are unable to achieve perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Although some improved schemes were proposed based on the evolution of long-term secrets, the analysis indicates that there exists a zero-sum trade-off between PFS and self-synchronization. In addition, privacy preservation remains a critical issue. In response, this paper proposes a novel three-party symmetric AKE scheme. Specifically, the secret evolving mechanism to prevent the reverse inference of crucial secret values is constructed in the scheme. Meanwhile, any reachable session state can be self-transferred to the synchronization state at the end of a complete session. The proposed scheme provides anonymity and pseudonym unlinkability to the required party, while also improving the robustness of conditional identity traceability, avoiding false accusations caused by misdirected requests. The formal analysis, heuristic analysis based on the state transition and secrecy dependency, and performance comparison indicate that the proposed scheme achieves essential properties while maintaining manageable overhead.

In disaster scenarios, secure and reliable data collection in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is crucial, yet the network often suffers from issues such as infrastructure damage, network partitioning, and vulnerabilities to attacks (e.g., False Data Injection and Black Hole Attack). Trust management is a promising solution to prevent these attacks. However, in infrastructure-less and partitioned disaster areas, existing trust schemes face problems of trust evidence sparsity and evaluation inconsistency, leading to inaccurate detection. To address these limitations, we propose an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Assisted Traceable and Hierarchical Trust Management scheme (UATHTM). The UATHTM includes a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) local trust model and a UAV-to-Vehicle (U2V) global trust model. The former facilitates rapid detection of false data, while the latter is designed for accurately tracing malicious vehicles. Specifically, the V2V model constructs a mutual adjustment between entity-centric and data-centric assessments, continuously refining trust for accurate local detection. The U2V model incorporates a new trust metric based on disaster trajectory similarity to enhance the accuracy of global tracing, through leveraging the comprehensive view of UAVs. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the UATHTM scheme outperforms existing trust management schemes, showing higher precision, recall, and F1-score in detecting false data and malicious vehicles in VANET under challenging conditions.

Chaos systems find extensive applications in cryptography and pseudorandom number generation due to their ability to generate pseudo-random signals. This paper focuses on enhancing the complexity of chaotic systems by introducing the memristor, a nonlinear component. We propose a novel map called the 2D memristive Cubic map (2D-MCM), which integrates the memristor with the Cubic map to create a discrete mapping. The 2D-MCM exhibits rich dynamical behavior and a broad parameter space. Notably, the 2D-MCM displays boosting bifurcation behavior. As the control parameters increase, the 2D-MCM demonstrates an expanded range of values, indicating its ability to generate a larger number of pseudo-random sequences. To validate its performance, we establish a hardware platform to physically capture the attractors of the 2D-MCM. To verify the performance of the 2D-MCM in generating pseudorandom sequences, we designed a video encryption algorithm based on the 2D-MCM. This algorithm selectively encrypts specific areas within the video, with correlation coefficients of the encrypted video in the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions being 0.0002, -0.0005, and 0.0004, respectively. Through simulation experiments and security analysis, we demonstrate that the 2D-MCM performs well in video encryption tasks.

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to a surge in fake news on social media, with toxic fake news having adverse effects on individuals, society, and governments. Detecting toxic fake news is crucial, but little prior research has been done in this area. This study aims to address this gap and identify toxic fake news to save time spent on examining nontoxic fake news. To achieve this, multiple datasets were collected from different online social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The latest samples were obtained by collecting data based on the topmost keywords extracted from the existing datasets. The instances were then labeled as toxic/nontoxic using toxicity analysis, and traditional machine-learning (ML) techniques such as linear support vector machine (SVM), conventional random forest (RF), and transformer-based ML techniques such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) were employed to design a toxic-fake news detection (FND) and classification system. As per the experiments, the linear SVM method outperformed BERT SVM, RF, and BERT RF with an accuracy of 92% and -score, -score, and -score of 95%, 85%, and 87%, respectively. Upon comparison, the proposed approach has either suppressed or achieved results very close to the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature by recording the best values on performance metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall for linear SVM. Overall, the proposed methods have shown promising results and urge further research to restrain toxic fake news. In contrast to prior research, the presented methodology leverages toxicity-oriented attributes and BERT-based sequence representations to discern toxic counterfeit news articles from nontoxic ones across social media platforms.

Mobile edge computing (MEC), located at the networks edge, enhances distributed computing. However, its fixed position presents limitations during emergencies. Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into MEC systems offers a solution but introduces challenges in managing UAV collaboration. This paper proposes a Reinforcement Deep Q-Learning based multi-UAV MEC framework to optimize quality of service (QoS) and route planning. The proposed framework addresses these challenges by modeling user demand and using multi-factor optimization considering user demand, risk, and distance. A Markov Decision Process (MDP) models user demand for higher QoS. The reinforcement learning reward matrix incorporates terminal user demand, risk, and distance for efficient energy use and resource allocation. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, offering valuable insights for future research in this domain.

A smart city involves big data transmission (BDT) between smart systems, which increases queue delays and leads to difficulty in enhancing the spectral efficiency. Adaptive modulation is an effective technique for enhancing data transmission rates in smart systems. However, traditional adaptive modulation approaches are not suitable for BDT in smart systems because the delays caused by the large amount of transmitted data lead to difficulty in evaluating the channel quality. In this paper, we propose a nondata-aided error vector (NDA-EVM) that can be employed in adaptive modulation over wireless channels. The proposed NDA-EVM can be used to evaluate the channel quality and symbol error rate (SER), which reflect the quality of service (QoS) of the system. We formulated the relationship between the NDA-EVM and SER, which provides a basis for designing adaptive modulation techniques for smart systems. To address the low average spectrum efficiency (ASE) caused by BDT queue delays, an adaptive modulation strategy based on the finite-state Markov chain (FSMC) of the NDA-EVM (i.e., NDA-EVM-AM) was designed. This method simplifies the adaptive modulation algorithm for smart systems to search for the optimal transfer probability in the FSMC matrix based on two typical states: the resident state and transient state. Moreover, we proposed an analytical procedure to describe queuing behavior to analyze the performance of the NDA-EVM-AM algorithm for smart systems in smart cities. The performance is compared with that of a conventional adaptive modulation algorithm through simulations. The results show that compared with traditional adaptive modulation, NDA-EVM-AM obtains a lower packet loss rate and higher spectral efficiency for smart systems.

Remote healthcare and telemedicine technology have witnessed a large and rapid development in the last decade with the large development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, where various types of medical sensors are aggregated for measuring medical parameters and transmitting them anywhere. Smart portable products can now be used to monitor different medical aspects to track human health. Also, they can be used in the prediagnosis of various diseases and in detecting abnormalities of organ functionality. In this article, we design and implement a multifunction and portable health monitoring system, which can help in daily medical inspections. The developed system monitors various medical aspects: heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation level (SpO2), body temperature, photoplethysmography (PPG) signal, electrocardiography (ECG) signal, room temperature, and room humidity. The obtained measurements are displayed on the built-in display or transmitted over Wi-Fi to either a mobile application, in the local mode, or to the cloud storage for remote monitoring. The developed system can be used to keep an eye on the people we need to care about, while keeping them in their normal daily life. The maximum error percentage of the proposed system is reported as 2.67%, 2.04%, and 1.58% for HR, SpO2, and body temperature, respectively, compared to commercial devices. In addition, statistical tests were performed and they showed a high level of agreement between the observed and the reference measurements. The results indicate the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed system to be used in daily medical applications.

Social media platforms have been widely used as a communication tool where most of the population expresses their feelings and shares life experiences. Along with general information about the public, these platforms hold an ample amount of content related to depressed users and thus can generate sensitive social signals indicating if a person is suffering from some serious issues, such as self-harm, suicidal thoughts, or intention for an unlawful act. Early depression detection using advanced natural language processing (NLP), deep machine learning, and transfer learning techniques can assist in designing an efficient system to detect major depressive systems at an early stage. The current depression detection models are not enough to capture sensitive social signals indicating the true mood, personality, and behavior of an individual. Thus, making the current systems unsatisfactory. To address this life-threatening human-health problem, we propose an efficient artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL)-based model for identifying depressed individuals on social media platforms. The model employs hybrid feature-based behavioral-biometric signals captured using Word2Vec, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) models to learn a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM) models. The data are captured from multiple sources using advanced crawling strategies to have data variety in the corpus. Thus, making the proposed system effective across platforms. The Dataset produced by this study is the first of its kind with a variety of depressive signals from online social network (OSN) platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The experiments have shown that both DL models LSTM and CNN, and the hybrid (CNN + LSTM) models achieved promising results on all individual as well as combined datasets. Out of 24 experiments for Word2Vec LSTM and Word2Vec (CNN + LSTM) models, we achieved the accuracy of 99.02% and 99.01%, respectively, and recorded as best results outperforming all the existing approaches on performance measures such as recall, precision, accuracy, and${F}1$-score. The Word2Vec-based features have been proved optimal features for detecting depressions symptoms on Facebook corpus (FC) and YouTube corpus (YC) by achieving an accuracy of 95.02% (with CNN) and 98.15% (with CNN + LSTM), respectively.

Next generation networks will involve huge number of industrial internet of things (IIoT) sensors which require reliable connectivity with low latency to manage the data transmission and processing. The design of these networks entails a lot of challenges. This article describes the 3D placement of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an IIoT network that supports non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). UAVs act as decode and forward (DF) relays. The 3D UAV placement problem is formulated which is highly non-convex in the coordinates. Therefore, we employ an improved adaptive whale optimization algorithm (IAWOA) to handle the problem. Even with its improved performance, IAWOA is not suitable for real-time application. Hence, we propose path aggregation network (PANet) to handle the 3D UAV placement. The simulation results show that PANet is more suitable for the online-learning.

The air transportation system has attracted due attention from researchers due to its fast expansion over the last decade. Past research has focused on air transportation networks (ATN), but this work considers the resilience of the air route network. This research work proposes a modified approach based on GRA-WSM, named MA (Modified Approach based on GRA-WSM) for the identification of critical edges that form the backbone of the Chinese air route network. MA is a two-step process: Initially, important nodes are identified using the proposed GRA-WSM, and second, a novel approach is used for the computation of critical edges. Previously, researchers have used edge betweenness centrality measure to identify vital edges. But it took into account the global information of a node. This research work considers different centrality measures as the multi-attribute of the network, to take advantage of each centrality measure. The proposed MA approach aims to minimize the robustness of the network after the removal of some edges and the result is the set of critical edges. The critical edges found by the proposed MA approach are different from the edges that are topologically more important. These findings provide new perspectives on how to better understand other real-world networks.

This article presents a multi-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)- and multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system for 5G/6G networks. In the studied system, multiple UAVs are integrated for providing services to large-scale user equipment (UEs) with the help of multiple IRSs. This article aims to minimize the overall cost including energy consumption, completion time, and maintenance cost of UAVs by jointly optimizing the trajectories of UAVs and phase shifts of IRSs. When solving this problem, one has to count in mind the deployment of stop points (SPs) of UAVs, and consider the association among UEs, and UAVs (i.e., which UE will send data to which UAV at which SP), the order of SPs, and the phase shifts of IRSs. Therefore, traditional optimization techniques may not solve the above-mentioned problem in an efficient way. To tackle the above-mentioned problem, this article proposes an algorithm called TPaPBA that consists of four phases. The first phase optimizes the SPs’ deployment via using a differential evolution algorithm having variable population size. As a result, all the SPs of UAVs can be obtained. Then, the second phase optimizes the association among UEs, SPs, and UAVs. Specifically, TPaPBA first adopts a clustering algorithm to optimize the SPs-UAVs association, and then a close criterion is introduced to optimize UEs-SPs association. Subsequently, third phase adopts a low-complexity greedy algorithm to optimize the order of SPs for UAVs. Finally, the phase shifts of IRSs are optimized to enhance the data rate between UEs and UAVs. The simulation results of TPaPBA on ten instances having UEs ranging from 100 to 1000, reveals that TPaPBA has significantly improved the system performance contribution and outperforms other approaches in terms of reducing the overall cost of UAVs.

Abstract Tomato is one of the most important vegetables worldwide. It is considered a mainstay of many countries’ economies. However, tomato crops are vulnerable to many diseases that lead to reducing or destroying production, and for this reason, early and accurate diagnosis of tomato diseases is very urgent. For this reason, many deep learning models have been developed to automate tomato leaf disease classification. Deep learning is far superior to traditional machine learning with loads of data, but traditional machine learning may outperform deep learning for limited training data. The authors propose a tomato leaf disease classification method by exploiting transfer learning and features concatenation. The authors extract features using pre‐trained kernels (weights) from MobileNetV2 and NASNetMobile; then, they concatenate and reduce the dimensionality of these features using kernel principal component analysis. Following that, they feed these features into a conventional learning algorithm. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of concatenated features for boosting the performance of classifiers. The authors have evaluated the three most popular traditional machine learning classifiers, random forest, support vector machine, and multinomial logistic regression; among them, multinomial logistic regression achieved the best performance with an average accuracy of 97%.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging technology for empowering various applications that generate large amounts of data in intelligent cyber–physical systems (ICPS). Though FL can address users’ concerns about data privacy, its maintenance still depends on efficient incentive mechanisms. For long-term incentivization to participants in data federation under dynamic environments, deep reinforcement learning as a promising technology has been extensively studied. However, the nonstationary problem caused by the heterogeneity of ICPS devices results in a serious effect on the convergence rate of existing single-agent reinforcement learning. In this article, we propose a multiagent learning-based incentive mechanism to capture the stationarity approximation in FL with heterogeneous ICPS. First, we formulate the secure communication and data resource allocation problem as a Stackelberg game in FL with multiple participants. Then, to tackle the heterogeneous problem, we model this multiagent game as a partially observable Markov decision process. In particular, a multiagent federated reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to learn the allocation policies efficiently by dwindling variances in policy evaluation caused by interaction among multiple devices without the requirement of sharing privacy information. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is proved to attain convergence at an expected rate. Finally, extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms baseline approaches.

The usage of cloud services is growing exponentially with the recent advancement of Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications. Advanced scheduling approaches are needed to successfully meet the application demands while harnessing cloud computing’s potential effectively to schedule the IoT services onto cloud resources optimally. This article proposes an alternative task scheduler approach for organizing IoT application tasks over the CCE. In particular, a novel hybrid swarm intelligence method, using a modified Manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO) and the salp swarm algorithm (SSA), is proposed to handle the problem of scheduling IoT tasks in cloud computing. This proposed method, called MRFOSSA, depends on using SSA to improve the local search ability of MRFO that typically enhances the rate of convergence towards the global solution. To validate the developed MRFOSSA, a set of experimental series is performed using different real-world and synthetic datasets with variant sizes. The performance of MRFOSSA is tested and compared with other metaheuristic techniques. Experiment results show the superiority of MRFOSSA over its competitors in terms of performance measures, such as makespan time and cloud throughput.

Facts reveal that numerous road accidents worldwide occur due to fatigue, drowsiness, and distraction while driving. Few works on the automated drowsiness detection problem, propose to extract physiological signals of the driver including ECG, EEG, heart variability rate, blood pressure, etc. which make those solutions non-ideal. While recent ones propose computer vision-based solutions but show limited performances as either they use hand-crafted features with conventional techniques like Naïve Bayes and SVM or use excessively bulky deep learning models which are still low on performances. Hence in this work, we propose an ensemble deep learning architecture that operates over incorporated features of eyes and mouth subsamples along with a decision structure to determine the fitness of the driver. The proposed ensemble model consists of only two InceptionV3 modules that help in containing the parameter space of the network. These two modules respectively and exclusively perform feature extraction of eyes and mouth subsamples extracted using the MTCNN from the face images. Their respective output is passed to the ensemble boundary using the weighted average method whose weights are tuned using the ensemble algorithm. The output of this system determines whether the driver is drowsy or non-drowsy. The benchmark NTHU-DDD video dataset is used for effective training and evaluation of the proposed model. The model established a train and validation accuracy of 99.65% and 98.5% respectively with an accuracy of 97.1% on the evaluation dataset which is significantly higher than those achieved by models proposed in recent works on this dataset.

COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant loss of global deaths, economical status, and so on. To prevent and control COVID-19, a range of smart, complex, spatially heterogeneous, control solutions, and strategies have been conducted. Earlier classification of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is needed to cure and control the disease. It results in a requirement of secondary diagnosis models, since no precise automated toolkits exist. The latest finding attained using radiological imaging techniques highlighted that the images hold noticeable details regarding the COVID-19 virus. The application of recent artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) approaches integrated to radiological images finds useful to accurately detect the disease. This article introduces a new synergic deep learning (SDL)-based smart health diagnosis of COVID-19 using Chest X-Ray Images. The SDL makes use of dual deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and involves a mutual learning process from one another. Particularly, the representation of images learned by both DCNNs is provided as the input of a synergic network, which has a fully connected structure and predicts whether the pair of input images come under the identical class. Besides, the proposed SDL model involves a fuzzy bilateral filtering (FBF) model to pre-process the input image. The integration of FBL and SDL resulted in the effective classification of COVID-19. To investigate the classifier outcome of the SDL model, a detailed set of simulations takes place and ensures the effective performance of the FBF-SDL model over the compared methods.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a new computing paradigm with great potential to alleviate resource limitations attributed to mobile device users (MDUs) by offloading intensive computations to ubiquitous MEC server. However, most of the current offloading policies allow MDUs to transmit their tasks to the same connected small base stations (sBSs), which invariably increases latency and limits performance gain due to overload. Moreover, the security issue mitigating sensitive communication of information is not adequately addressed. Therefore, in this study, in addition to proposing a joint load balancing and computation offloading (CO) technique for MEC systems, we introduce a new security layer to circumvent potential security issues. First, a load balancing algorithm for efficient redistribution of MDUs among sBSs is proposed. In addition, a new advanced encryption standard (AES) cryptographic technique suffused with electrocardiogram (ECG) signal-based encryption and decryption key is presented as a security layer to safeguard the vulnerability of data during the transmission. Furthermore, an integrated model of load balancing, CO and security is formulated as a problem whose goal is to decrease the time and energy demands of the system. Detailed experimental results prove that our model with and without the additional security layers can save about 68.2% and 72.4% of system consumption compared to the local execution.

Smart cities provide citizens with smart and advanced services to improve their quality of life. However, it has been observed that the collection, storage, processing, and analysis of heterogeneous data that are usually borne by citizens will bear certain difficulties. The development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, social media, and other Industry 4.0 influencers pushed technology into a smart society’s framework, bringing potential vulnerabilities to sensor data, services, and smart city applications. These vulnerabilities lead to data security problems. We propose a decentralized data management system for smart and secure transportation that uses blockchain and the Internet of Things in a sustainable smart city environment to solve the data vulnerability problem. A smart transportation mobility system demands creating an interconnected transit system to ensure flexibility and efficiency. This article introduces prior knowledge and then provides a Hyperledger Fabric-based data architecture that supports a secure, trusted, smart transportation system. The simulation results show the balance between the blockchain mining time and the number of blocks created. We also use the average transaction delay evaluation model to evaluate the model and to test the proposed system’s performance. The system will address residents’ and authorities’ security challenges of the transportation system in smart, sustainable cities and lead to better governance.

Data security plays a significant role in data transfer in cloud-based smart cities. Chaotic maps are commonly used in designing modern cryptographic applications, in which one-dimensional (1D) chaotic systems are widely used due to their simple design and low computational complexity. However, 1D chaotic maps suffer from different kinds of attacks because of their chaotic discontinuous ranges and small key-space. To own the benefits of 1D chaotic maps and avoid their drawbacks, the cascading of two integrated 1D chaotic systems has been utilized. In this paper, we report an image cryptosystem for data transfer in cloud-based smart cities using the cascading of Logistic-Chebyshev and Logistic-Sine maps. Logistic-Sine map has been utilized to permute the plain image, and Logistic-Chebyshev map has been used to substitute the permuted image, while the cascading of both integrated maps has been utilized in performing XOR procedure on the substituted image. The security analyses of the suggested approach prove that the encryption mechanism has good efficiency as well as lower encryption time compared with other related algorithms.

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) enable various oceanic applications which require effective packet transmission. In this case, sparse node distribution, imbalance in terms of overall energy consumption between the different sensor nodes, dynamic network topology, and inappropriate selection of relay nodes cause void holes. Addressing this problem, we present a relay-based void hole prevention and repair (ReVOHPR) protocol by multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for UWSN. ReVOHPR is a global solution that implements different phases of operations that act mutually in order to efficiently reduce and identify void holes and trap relay nodes to avoid it. ReVOHPR adopts the following operations as ocean depth (levels)-based equal cluster formation, dynamic sleep scheduling, virtual graph-based routing, and relay-assisted void hole repair. For energy-efficient cluster forming, entropy-based eligibility ranking (E2R) is presented, which elects stable cluster heads (CHs). Then, dynamic sleep scheduling is implemented by the dynamic kernel Kalman filter (DK2F) algorithm in which sleep and active modes are based on the node’s current status. Intercluster routing is performed by maximum matching nodes that are selected by dual criteria, and also the data are transmitted to AUV. Finally, void holes are detected and repaired by the bicriteria mayfly optimization (BiCMO) algorithm. The BiCMO focuses on reducing the number of holes and data packet loss and maximizes the quality of service (QoS) and energy efficiency of the network. This protocol is timely dealing with node failures in packet transmission via multihop routing. Simulation is implemented by the NS3 (AquaSim module) simulator that evaluates the performance in the network according to the following metrics: average energy consumption, delay, packet delivery rate, and throughput. The simulation results of the proposed REVOHPR protocol comparing to the previous protocols allowed to conclude that the REVOHPR has considerable advantages. Due to the development of a new protocol with a set of phases for data transmission, energy consumption minimization, and void hole avoidance and mitigation in UWSN, the number of active nodes rate increases with the improvement in overall QoS.

Ultrareliable and low‐latency connection (URLLC) is one of the novel features in 5G networks and subsequent generations, in which it targets to fulfill stringent requirements on data rates, reliability, and availability. Moreover, the multiconnectivity concept is introduced to meet these requirements, where multiple different technologies are connected simultaneously, and the data packet is duplicated and transmitted from multiple transmitters. To this end, in this paper, we present an analysis, model, and method to ensure the reliability of data delivery when organizing URLLC in 5G networks. In addition, a new approach based on the organization of multiple connections (multiconnectivity) and duplication of transmitted data is considered. Further, an analytical model is presented for assessing the probability of failure, taking into account the traffic intensity, the probability of failure of elements, and the number of used connections. Moreover, an efficient method is proposed for increasing the reliability of data delivery by optimizing the number of connections. Further, a multiconnectivity‐based URLLC model has been built for evaluating the proposed method and verifies that the optimal number of routes for data delivery between the user and the point of service can be obtained, where the probability of losses and equipment reliability are jointly considered. Finally, detailed analysis of results shown that with “equal” routes in terms of load (with an equally probable traffic distribution) and the probability of equipment failure, the optimal number of routes can be found, at which the minimum probability of losses is achieved.

In the explosive growth of time-series data (TSD), the scale of TSD suggests that the scale and capability of many Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications has already been exceeded. Moreover, redundancy persists in TSD due to the correlation between information acquired via different sources. In this article, we propose a cohort of dominant data set selection algorithms for electricity consumption TSD with a focus on discriminating the dominant data set that is a small data set but capable of representing the kernel information carried by TSD with an arbitrarily small error rate less than$\varepsilon $. Furthermore, we prove that the selection problem of the minimum dominant data set is an NP-complete problem. The affine transformation model is introduced to define the linear correlation relationship between TSD objects. Our proposed framework consists of the scanning selection algorithm with$O({n^{3}})$time complexity and the greedy selection algorithm with$O({n^{4}})$time complexity, which are, respectively, proposed to select the dominant data set based on the linear correlation distance between TSD objects. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on the real electricity consumption data of Harbin city in China. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms not only reduce the size of the extracted kernel data set but also ensure the TSD integrity in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Fifth generation (5G) networks are the base communication technology for connecting objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. 5G is being developed to provide extremely large capacity, robust integrity, high bandwidth, and low latency. With the development and innovating new techniques for 5G-IoT, it surely will drive to new enormous security and privacy challenges. Consequently, secure techniques for data transmissions will be needed as the basis for 5G-IoT technology to address these arising challenges. Therefore, various traditional security mechanisms are provided for 5G-IoT technologies and most of them are built on mathematical foundations. With the growth of quantum technologies, traditional cryptographic techniques may be compromised due to their mathematical computation based construction. Quantum walks (QWs) is a universal quantum computational model, which possesses inherent cryptographic features that can be utilized to build efficient cryptographic mechanisms. In this paper, we use the features of quantum walk to construct a new S-box method which plays a significant role in block cipher techniques for 5G-IoT technologies. As an application of the presented S-box mechanism and controlled alternate quantum walks (CAQWs) for 5G-IoT technologies a new robust video encryption mechanism is proposed. As well as to fulfill needs of encryption for varied files in 5G-IoT, we utilize the features of quantum walk to propose a novel encryption strategy for secure transmission of sensitive files in 5G-IoT paradigm. The analyses and results of the proposed cryptosystems show that it has better security properties and efficacy in terms of cryptographic performance.

In this paper, a novel quantum encryption algorithm for color image is proposed based on multiple discrete chaotic systems.The proposed quantum image encryption algorithm utilize the quantum controlled-NOT image generated by chaotic logistic map, asymmetric tent map and logistic Chebyshev map to control the XOR operation in the encryption process.Experiment results and analysis show that the proposed algorithm has high efficiency and security against differential and statistical attacks.

In this paper, a new selective encryption scheme based on DWT, AES S-box and chaotic permutation is proposed. The new scheme is composed of six steps: Image decomposition, Block permutation, DWT decomposition, substitution phase, chaotic permutation phase and reconstruction phase. Firstly, it generates four subbands, namely cAP, cVP, cHP and cDP, and encrypts only cAP subband, which contains the meaningful part of data. The proposed cryptosystem is evaluated using various security and statistical analysis. The performance tests show that the proposed scheme is secure against statistical and differential attacks.