Within the realm of 6G Internet of Vehicles (6G-IoV), Federated Learning (FL) has become a notable machine learning framework, providing a decentralized method to protect data privacy while allowing cooperative model training. Specifically, with 6G technology, FL will benefit from ultra-low latency, high reliability and massive connectivity, enabling real-time model updates and efficient data sharing in the 6G-IoV ecosystem. However, FL faces challenges like the single points of failure and potential privacy leakage from data providers. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose a blockchain-based trustworthy verifiable FL scheme for 6G-IoV, that is, AVBFL. Firstly, we introduce blockchain technology to address the issue of decentralization by storing transactions on-chain. Furthermore, to protect the privacy of local gradients, we utilize the Burmester-Desmedt (BD) multi-party key agreement protocol to negotiate a shared key and encrypt the gradients with the AES encryption algorithm. We also sign transactions using the ECDSA signature algorithm. Additionally, we design a time-sensitive Proof of Stake (TPoS) consensus mechanism based on Newton’s cooling law to boost participants’ enthusiasm for training and select the miner with the highest stake to mine the block. Finally, experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of AVBFL. In the presence of malicious nodes, the average accuracy rate is increased by 71.8% compared to the VFL scheme and by 8.6% compared to the VBFL scheme.

The current landscape of data-centric Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) encompasses a fusion of Human-driven Vehicles, Autonomous Vehicles, Road-Side Units, and edge-based devices engaged in periodic communication. Given the stringent latency requirements inherent in vehicular communications, the emergence of edge-based vehicular Digital Twins (DTs) plays a pivotal role in problem-solving, ensuring rapid response, regulatory compliance, and seamless availability. While these communications serve as the backbone of IoV, they also create an opportune environment for cybercriminals to exploit. Vulnerabilities at the network layer facilitate intrusions, resulting in a surge of data falsification attacks in recent years. Addressing this challenge demands resilient and intelligent threat detection schemes capable of adapting to the dynamic nature of IoV. This study conducts a comprehensive examination of the vulnerabilities in Vehicle-to-DT (V2DT) data communication through the lens of an attacker utilizing False Data Injection Attack (FDIA). It utilizes cutting-edge Blockchain-based decentralized storage and buffering mechanisms for vehicle dynamics data en route to edge-based DTs. Further, deep learning-powered sensor data analysis serves as an additional layer of security. Evaluation of the proposed threat detection and mitigation model demonstrates 100% tamper detection in V2DT communication, coupled with a 96% accurate classification of anomalous driving behaviors, including aggressive driving or FDIAs.

Accompanied by the booming development of artificial intelligence technology, deep learning has been widely used in many fields of cancer, specially in cancer prediction. The dependence on training data for deep learning naturally raises privacy leakage concerns. Federated learning is a promising solution to these issues, but it is limited by the computational capacity of clients. Therefore, this paper has proposed a Split Federated Learning (SFL)-based breast cancer prediction scheme with dynamic client selection aggregation, by aggregating data from multiple healthcare organizations under the premise of privacy protection. First, the split learning is integrated into federated learning to predict breast canner, which contributes to protecting data privacy and reducing the computational burden on client devices. Then, the dynamic client selection aggregation is devised to lower the aggregation communication costs and improve communication efficiency by utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to evaluate the availability of each client devices in participating training. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments on the CAMELYON16 dataset to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme, and the experimental results have shown that our proposed scheme can converge faster and achieve the lower communication costs.

With the surge in wireless data traffic, integrating millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology into vehicular networks enables high-speed communication. Meanwhile, the rising demand for secure wireless communication drives the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to enhance physical layer security (PLS) through intelligent channel control. This paper investigates PLS approaches in multi-RIS-assisted mmWave vehicular communication under stochastic geometry architecture. Taking the dynamically changing and random nature of vehicular network topologies into account, we propose a vehicular network association scheme for a typical vehicle. In this scheme when the quality of the direct link deteriorates due to obstacles or other factors, RIS-assisted communication ensures a more stable connection. By leveraging stochastic geometry theory, a tractable analytical framework is established to evaluate the secrecy performance of the downlink transmission comprehensively. Specifically, the closed-form expressions of connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived. Simulation results demonstrate that introducing RIS into vehicular networks and utilizing the proposed association scheme can significantly improve the security of vehicular networks.

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), privacy preservation is a major challenge due to the mobility of vehicles and their resource-constrained nature. The limited resources of on-board units (OBUs) and embedded sensors lure the adversaries to launch various types of attacks. Thus, lightweight but reliable authentication schemes need to be designed to combat these attacks. Another major challenge is the scarcity of available bandwidth and excessive delay experienced by vehicles while they communicate with the servers located at the cloud. These servers execute various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms to extract useful features from upstream traffic of IoV. To addresses these challenges, we propose an ML-based authentication scheme that trains and classifies the vehicles at the edge servers in a distributed manner, preserves the privacy of communicating entities and minimizes the bandwidth consumption and delay experienced by the vehicles. The ML-based approach extends the decision power of vehicles and edge servers to identify adversaries. Our scheme requires that each vehicle participates in an offline phase, where a trusted authority shares a list of MaskIDs and secret keys of legitimate vehicles and edge servers. A timestamp is embedded in the payload of each encrypted message to prune the proposed scheme against well-known adversarial attacks. The simulation results verify the exceptional performance of our scheme in terms of computational overhead, communication overhead, and storage overhead.

The dynamic nature of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) presents significant challenges in managing the resources of the network. Traditional methods often fail to handle this dynamism of the network, resulting in communication inefficiencies and delays. This paper introduces a novel framework, DTRiDMA, which integrates digital twins (DT), intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), and multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) to tackle these challenges. DTs simulate various traffic scenarios and network conditions, enabling optimized resource allocation strategies. IRSs improve signal strength and coverage, ensuring efficient communication. MADDPG dynamically allocates network resources based on real-time traffic data and simulated scenarios learned through DTs. The proposed framework is trained on a comprehensive data set of real-world transportation networks that incorporate diverse traffic conditions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the benchmarks, achieving higher accuracy (15.5 bps/Hz), a higher maximum achievable rate (17.3 bps/Hz), maximum resource allocation efficiency (96%), and higher scalability (97%). These results highlight the framework’s ability to improve the adaptability and efficiency of ITS networks.

Emerging applications are placing increasing demands on wireless networks, particularly in terms of ensuring reliable communication for control-related information. However, the complexity of network architectures and the growing number of user devices present significant challenges in achieving reliable multiple access. In this paper, we present a framework that utilizes machine learning (ML) to meet the need for reliable access in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. The K-means algorithm is employed to cluster users according to their communication reliability requirements, grouping together users with similar demands within each cluster. Each cluster adopts a different access strategy: clusters with lower reliability requirements utilize non-orthogonal multiple access to enhance spectrum efficiency, while clusters with higher reliability requirements employ orthogonal multiple access to ensure reliability. Taking into account the impact of UAV altitude and power allocation schemes on reliability, we propose an iterative algorithm to optimize the UAV altitude and power allocation factors, aiming to maximize UAV coverage while meeting the users’ reliability requirements. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed ML-based reliable access scheme, highlighting its potential to enhance the design and deployment of reliable communication in future UAV networks.

Efficient utilization of Big data in smart cities is crucial for smooth operation of urban environments. Machine learning-enabled big data analytics is essential for optimizing city operations, improving resource management, and enhancing the quality of urban life. By leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms to process and analyze the vast amounts of data generated in smart cities, authorities can gain insights and make real-time data-driven decisions. This article provides a comprehensive survey of how ML techniques are applied to analyze the large volumes of data generated by smart cities to improve urban living. Various ML algorithms, such as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning (RL) are discussed by highlighting their roles in numerous applications. Moreover, their distinguishing features are examined, enabling the selection of the most suitable algorithms for various applications in smart cities. Finally, the survey explores various challenges and suggests numerous research directions.

The combination of millimeter-wave (mmWave) and massive MIMO techniques can fulfill high data rate requirements for vehicular networks. However, due to the elevated path loss and severe blocking effects in mmWave propagation, the downlink data service of vehicles will seriously deteriorate. Fortunately, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can serve as a single-user relay to mitigate individual performance degradation without additional power consumption. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based joint user schedule and RIS-User pairing scheme for the dynamic mmWave vehicular network to alleviate the blocking effects and maximize the total transmission data volume while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) for all target vehicles. In this scheme, each target vehicle has a distinct QoS constraint called minimum service data volume, which is a long-term and posterior optimization problem. Thus, QoS constraints are introduced in the reward design of the DRL algorithm, and the problem of high-dimensional action spaces is addressed by utilizing two nested Dueling Double-DQN (D-D3QN) networks. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme in mmWave vehicular networks.

In this paper, we focus on addressing the challenges of detecting malicious attacks in networks by designing an advanced Explainable Intrusion Detection System (xIDS). The existing machine learning and deep learning approaches have invisible limitations, such as potential biases in predictions, a lack of interpretability, and the risk of overfitting to training data. These issues can create doubt about their usefulness, and transparency, and decrease the trust of involved stakeholders. To overcome these challenges, we propose an ensemble learning technique called the "EnsembleGuard". This approach uses the predicted outputs of multiple models, including tree-based (LightGBM, GBM, Bagging, XGBoost, CatBoost) and deep learning models such as neural network (LSTM (long short-term memory networks) and GRU (gated recurrent unit), to maintain a balance and achieve trustworthy results. Our work is unique because it combines both tree-based and deep learning models to design an interpretable and explainable meta-model through model distillation. By considering the predictions of all individual models, our neta-model effectively addresses key challenges, and ensures both explainable and reliable results. We evaluate our model using well-known datasets, including UNSW-NB15, NSL-KDD, and CIC-IDS-2017, to assess its reliability against various types of attacks. During analysis, we found that our model outperforms both tree-based models and other comparative approaches when it comes to different kinds of attack scenarios.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has shown its presence in applications that require monitoring extreme environments, such as wildfires, military operations, and coastal areas, among others. In these applications, the IoT nodes are deployed in hazardous terrains where humanistic access is hard or not possible. Hence, to ensure reliable data transmission in these applications, novel routing protocols need to be designed due to the multihop nature of communication possessed by the deployed nodes. Currently, most of the routing protocols utilized by IoT nodes follow traditional approaches, which creates congestion and contention in the network. As a result, the network performance is degraded in terms of various communication metrics. To address this problem and improve the communication statistics in extreme environments, we propose a deep-$Q$-learning-enable-destination-sequenced distance-vector (DQL-DSDV) framework. DQL-DSDV focuses on selecting the next hop during communication. Initially, the DSDV protocol updates routing information for connected nodes. This information is subsequently utilized by the deep-$Q$-learning (DQL) algorithm to compute the next hop count. This computation is based on reward functions, known as$Q$-values, which are conceptualized as the distance between connected nodes by taking into account the traffic flow. These distinguishing operational features of DQL and DSDV ensure that DQL-DSDV minimizes the packet lost ratio, congestion, end-to-end delay, and communication cost with improved Quality of Service (QoS). During simulations, we observed significant improvement in these performance metrics, in the presence of the existing schemes. Despite that, we checked the computation complexity of the proposed approach with existing protocols, which demonstrated noteworthy outcomes just like the other metrics.

The dynamic evolution of wireless communication, driven by the Internet of Everything (IoE) and the envisioned 6G networks, presents both challenges and opportunities. IoE expands beyond IoT, encompassing diverse devices, human interactions, and environmental elements. To unlock IoE’s vast potential and harness the capabilities of 6G, we propose a framework named ISRiD, which assimilates three key components: Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). This creates an adaptive, data-driven communication framework for IoE and 6G. ISAC enhances situational awareness, RIS optimizes signal paths, and DDPG adds intelligence. This empowers devices to collect environmental data for optimization and intelligent decisions. By leveraging real-time sensor data, ISRiD optimizes communication protocols, significantly improving efficiency and reliability in wireless networks. Despite challenges, this approach equips IoE, including the advancements brought by 6G, to meet evolving demands, as validated by empirical experiments and simulations.

Artificial Intelligence of Medical Things (AIoMT) is a hybrid of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and artificial intelligence to materialize the acquisition of real-time data via the smart wearable devices. Due to a diverse geographical environment of IoMT, secure, and reliable communication among these devices is a challenging task that needs to be resolved on priority basis. For this purpose, numerous device-focused authentication approaches have been proposed in the literature, however, the problem still persists. This article introduces an advanced, secured, and efficient solution for the IoMT by leveraging a lightweight mutual authentication scheme as well as facilitating AI-enabled Big Data analytics and predictive modeling. The proposed approach is specifically designed to establish secured communication between wearable sensing devices and servers within IoMT by exploiting the desirable features of cloud–edge paradigm. In this approach, every device needs to verify whether the requesting wearable device is legitimate or not and this process needs to be carried out prior to the actual communication. Our proposed approach employs a hybrid of Advanced Encryption Standard, i.e., AES-128 bit and medium access control (MAC) for the establishment of secured communication sessions. In addition, the proposed approach utilizes real-time data collection from wearable devices, enabling predictive modeling for the early detection of health anomalies, thereby, enhancing the patient outcomes of a specific disease. This continuously adaptive approach excels in real-time decision making, promptly alerting healthcare professionals of potential risks. Simulation results have verified that the proposed approach serves an ideal solution for the resource-constrained devices by achieving the expected level of authenticity through minimum possible communication and processing overhead. Additionally, this scheme is prune against well-known security attacks in the AIoMT infrastructures.

Blockchain technology has found applications across diverse domains owing to its ability to establish trust in a decentralized manner. Nevertheless, the integration of blockchain into critical infrastructure domains encounters significant challenges posed by the computational demands and storage requirements associated with the proof-of-work puzzle during the mining process. This scenario becomes particularly complex in the context of applications within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), where stringent timeliness constraints are inherent, notably in functions such as intrusion detection and control. This paper presents a novel solution that takes into account the time-sensitive nature of application constraints within the IIoT. Specifically, we focus on online functions involving intrusion detection and control. By doing so, we address the imperative need for timely and secure data delivery, crucial in maintaining the integrity of hard-to-tamper ledger blocks. These blocks encapsulate measurements that are seamlessly utilized by various system functions and components. The proposed approach optimizes the utilization of heterogeneous resources governing blockchain computations. This optimization ensures that the desired properties for logging within the blockchain are met, enabling the prompt delivery of measurements. The novel collaborative mining technique entails the sharing of nonce ranges among miners, which effectively reduces the overall mining time and enhances the efficiency of the process.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted data collection has been extensively employed in various application scenarios, e.g., nonterrestrial networks for disaster management, agricultural crop protection, environmental monitoring. However, data collection and transmission model in different applications are not universal, and the timeliness of large-scale data collection and transmission also has been remained as a challenge. To address this issue, artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered intelligent search algorithms for path planning in UAV-assisted data collection networks are investigated in this article. With the constraints, including energy consumption, transmission distances, and full coverage of sensors, a data collection model using UAV in hovering mode is first established for minimizing the flight distances of UAVs, and an adaptive full coverage algorithm (AFCA) is proposed to optimize the Quality of Service through using the model. Subsequently, for optimizing the path planning of UAVs, an intelligent path planning algorithm (IPPA) is proposed through considering the loop and noncrossing characteristics presented by the optimal paths. In six testing cases with different sensor sizes, the experimental results have been shown to demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms the traditional algorithms.

Data mining, integration, and utilization are the inevitable trend of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in the context of Big Data. With the increasing demand for data privacy, federated learning has emerged as a new paradigm, which enables distributed joint training of medical data sources without leaving the private domain. However, federated learning is suffering from security threats as the shared local model will reveal original datasets. Privacy leakage is even more fatal in healthcare because medical data contains critically sensitive information. In addition, open wireless channels are susceptible to malicious attacks. To further safeguard the privacy of IoMT, we propose a comprehensive privacy-preserving federated learning scheme with a tactful dropout handling mechanism. The proposed scheme leverages blind masking and certificateless proxy re-encryption (CL-PRE) for secure aggregation, ensuring the confidentiality of the local model and rendering the global model invisible to any parties other than clients. It also provides authentication of uploaded models while protecting identity privacy. Compared with other relevant schemes, our solution has better performance on functional features and efficiency, and is more applicable to IoMT systems with many devices.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) comprise a whole infrastructure of conventional vehicles, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), roadside units, and communication equipment. As a result, a variety of smart sensors, cloud, and edge services are used. Due to the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication involved in these, the infrastructure becomes prone to security attacks. The most common of these is False Data Injection Attack (FDIA), which causes serious consequences upon driving decisions of a CAV. Blockchain is an ascending technology to provide proficient data security solutions; however, its implementation in securing CAV data is restricted due to its parallel reliance on cloud services. Furthermore, a standalone blockchain is prone to transaction verification delay and reduced transaction throughput, which is intolerable in the fast-paced CAV communication. This paper presents a novel framework enabling multichain, an open-source blockchain platform. Components of the proposed framework include multiple blockchains running on CAVs. The hashing algorithm operates on their Basic Safety Messages (BSMs), inputted to it as blockchain transactions. Our findings reveal that this multichain framework eliminates reliance on cloud services by devising a fully decentralized security solution against stealthy FDIAs that jeopardize a CAV’s lane-changing. It provides an economy-building point for the CAV-metaverse by incentivizing the participating CAVs. Further, it manages transactions by employing multiple parallel blockchains for enhanced throughput. CAVs perform these security checks in as low as a few milliseconds compared to the existing centralized and computationally intensive frameworks.

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in healthcare has introduced new challenges in preserving data privacy, security and patient safety. Traditional approaches need to ensure security and privacy while maintaining computational efficiency, particularly for resource-constrained IoT devices. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach by combining federated learning and blockchain technology to provide a secured and privacy-preserved solution for IoT-enabled healthcare applications. Our approach leverages a public-key cryptosystem that provides semantic security for local model updates, while blockchain technology ensures the integrity of these updates and enforces access control and accountability. The federated learning process enables a secure model aggregation without sharing sensitive patient data. We implement and evaluate our proposed framework using EMNIST datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving data privacy and security while maintaining computational efficiency. The results suggest that our hybrid approach can significantly enhance the development of secure and privacy-preserved IoT-enabled healthcare applications, offering a promising direction for future research in this field.

Despite the high directionality of antennas in terahertz communication, there remains a risk of confidential message interception when eavesdroppers are within the beam coverage area. This paper proposes a blockage-based cooperative jamming scheme to enhance the security of terahertz communication. Due to significant signal attenuation caused by blockages in the terahertz frequency band, we select idle users with blockages between them and the typical user in the indoor three-dimensional (3D) space to act as cooperative jammers. Thus, the jamming signal can deteriorate the reception of eavesdroppers while effectively minimizing interference to the typical user. Taking into account the influence of terahertz channel characteristics, blockage, and 3D antenna model, we derive analytical expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP). Besides, we analyze the effects of access point (AP) density, blockage density, and user idle factor on network performance. Our results demonstrate that the blockage-based cooperative jamming scheme effectively improves the secrecy performance of the terahertz network.

The awareness of edge computing is attaining eminence and is largely acknowledged with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT). Edge-enabled solutions offer efficient computing and control at the network edge to resolve the scalability and latency-related concerns. Though, it comes to be challenging for edge computing to tackle diverse applications of IoT as they produce massive heterogeneous data. The IoT-enabled frameworks for Big Data analytics face numerous challenges in their existing structural design, for instance, the high volume of data storage and processing, data heterogeneity, and processing time among others. Moreover, the existing proposals lack effective parallel data loading and robust mechanisms for handling communication overhead. To address these challenges, we propose an optimized IoT-enabled big data analytics architecture for edge-cloud computing using machine learning. In the proposed scheme, an edge intelligence module is introduced to process and store the big data efficiently at the edges of the network with the integration of cloud technology. The proposed scheme is composed of two layers: IoT-edge and Cloud-processing. The data injection and storage is carried out with an optimized MapReduce parallel algorithm. Optimized Yet Another Resource Negotiator (YARN) is used for efficiently managing the cluster. The proposed data design is experimentally simulated with an authentic dataset using Apache Spark. The comparative analysis is decorated with existing proposals and traditional mechanisms. The results justify the efficiency of our proposed work.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) effectively tackles several shortcomings of conventional healthcare systems. It includes medical personnel shortages, patient care quality, insufficient medical supplies, and healthcare expenditures. There are several advantages of using IoMT technology for enhanced treatment efficiency and quality, thus improving patient health. However, the frequency and magnitude of cyberattacks on IoMT are increasing at a breakneck pace. Therefore, this article proposes a cyberattack detection method for IoMT-based networks using ensemble learning and fog-cloud architecture to address security issues. The ensemble technique employs a set of long short-term memory (LSTM) networks as individual learners at the first level and stacks a decision tree on top of them to classify attack and normal events. In addition, we present a framework for deploying the proposed IoMT-based approach as Infrastructure as a Service in the cloud and Software as a Service in the fog. The proposed method is evaluated on the telemetry datasets of IoT and IIoT sensors (ToN-IoT) dataset, and the outcomes reveal that it surpasses the baseline approaches in terms of precision by 4%.

Data integrity and authenticity are among the key challenges faced by the interacting devices of Internet of Things (IoT). The resource-constrained nature of sensor-embedded devices makes it even more difficult to design lightweight security schemes for these networks. In view of limited resources of the IoT devices, this article proposes a lightweight and trustworthy device-to-server mutual authentication scheme for edge-enabled IoT networks. Initially, a trusted authority generates and assigns identities (IDs) and mask them to servers and clients, also known as member devices, in an offline phase. These IDs are utilized to prevent possible infiltration of the adversary device(s). Next, every device ensures the authenticity of requesting devices using a sophisticated challenge, which is encrypted using a 128-b secret key,$\lambda _{i}$. Each device expects a reply from the intended destination device for resolving the encrypted challenge within the defined timeframe,$i.e., \bigtriangleup T$. Moreover, authenticity of the requesting device is verified through the stored IDs, which are shared in the offline phase. Simulation results have verified the exceptional performance of the proposed authentication scheme against field proven approaches in terms of computational and communication costs.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an intermediary can offer an efficient and useful communication paradigm for different Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Following the operational capabilities of IoTs, this emerging technology could be extremely helpful in the area, where human access is not possible. Because IoT devices are employed in an infrastructure-less environment, where they communicate with each other via the wireless medium to share accumulated data in network topological order. However, the unstructured deployment with wireless and dynamic communication make them disclosed to various security threats, which need to be addressed for their efficient results. Therefore, the primary objective of this work is to present a comprehensive survey of the theoretical literature associated with security concerns of this emerging technology from 2015-to-2022. To follow up this, we have overviewed different security threats of UAV-aided IoT applications followed by their countermeasures techniques to identify the current challenges and requirements of this emerging technology paradigm that must be addressed by researchers, enterprise market, and industry stakeholders. In light of underscored constrains, we have highlighted the open security challenges that could be assumed a move forward step toward setting the future research insights. By doing this, we set a preface for the answer to a question, why this paper is needed in the presence of published review articles. For novelty and uniqueness, we have performed a comparative analysis section-wise with rival papers to demonstrate that how this paper is different from them.

Since millions of smart vehicles in Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) produce and relay data to analyze road conditions, creating social networks of vehicles in IoV is an important factor for the future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Likewise, the IoV architecture has seen vertical fragmentation of approaches used to meet the needs of different work domains. Therefore, IoV in combination with social networking, called Social IoV (SIoV), was created to address these alleged problems. However, one of the challenges in SIoV is that the social relations between vehicles grow and deplete very fast due to the extremely dynamic and unstable nature of the IoV. Therefore, a clustering-based scheme for SIoV, which is efficient in terms of stability can overcome this problem. We propose SeAC: an SDN-enabled adaptive clustering technique for SIoV. SeAC uses a 3D modeling approach to construct logical clusters that are based on factors such as physical location, social tie, and interest similarity among vehicles. Therefore, SeAC improves the stability of clusters and the efficiency of the underlying SIoV architecture. Additionally, by minimizing the trade-off between social and physical distances, SeAC lowers communication and computation costs. We evaluate SeAC, and the simulation results show that for two different topologies, the adaptive approach using SeAC can produce better results in terms of a stable cluster formation.

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS), massive data generated in the system not only requires to be stored reliably and cheaply, but also needs to be analyzed timely. The Cloud-based Maritime Transportation Systems (CMTS) allow users to upload the data without worrying about the price, capacity, location and so on. However, CMTS also brings some security issues, where the integrity protection of outsourced data is one of the most important issues since it is crucial for the safety, reliability and efficiency of sea lanes. To solve this problem, we propose an identity-based dynamic data integrity auditing scheme for CMTS. Our scheme decreases the burden of key management and improves the auditing efficiency by batch auditing. Besides, our scheme also supports dynamic operations on the outsourced data for CMTS. The security analysis shows that our scheme can ensure the feature of storage correctness and resist common attacks. In addition, the performance comparison results with other related schemes show that our scheme not only has the lowest computational cost on all entities, but also greatly reduces the communication overhead of the auditing phase. Therefore, our scheme is very suitable for data integrity verification in CMTS.

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) has gained increasing interest due to its potential to provide low latency and reduce the load in backhaul networks. In order to meet drastically increasing computation demands from emerging ever-growing vehicular applications, e.g., autonomous driving, abundant computation resources of individual vehicles can play a crucial role in task execution in a VEC scenario, that can further contribute in considerably improving user experience. This is however an extremely challenging task due to high mobility of vehicles that can easily lead to intermittent connectivity, thereby disrupting on-going task processing. In this paper, we propose a task offloading scheme by exploiting multi-hop vehicle computation resources in VEC based on mobility analysis of vehicles. In addition to the vehicles within one hop from the task vehicle that generates computation tasks, certain multi-hop vehicles that meet the given requirements in terms of link connectivity and computation capacity, are also leveraged to carry out the tasks offloaded by the task vehicle. An optimization problem is formulated for the task vehicle to minimize the weighted sum of execution time and computation cost of all tasks. A semidefinite relaxation approach with an adaptive adjustment procedure is proposed to solve the formulated optimization problem for obtaining the corresponding offloading decisions. The simulation results show that our proposed offloading scheme can achieve significant improvement in terms of response delay by at least 34% compared with the other algorithms (e.g., local processing and random offloading).

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) connected in the form of Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the infrastructure-less deployment of IoT devices. Device-to-Device (D2D) authentication of these networks ensures the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of information in the deployed area. The literature suggests different approaches to address security issues in CPS technologies. However, they are mostly based on centralized techniques or specific system deployments with higher cost of computation and communication. It is therefore necessary to develop an effective scheme that can resolve the security problems in CPS technologies of IoT devices. In this paper, a lightweight Hash-MAC-DSDV (Hash Media Access Control Destination Sequence Distance Vector) routing scheme is proposed to resolve authentication issues in CPS technologies, connected in the form of IoT networks. For this purpose, a CPS of IoT devices (multi-WSNs) is developed from the local-chain and public chain, respectively. The proposed scheme ensures D2D authentication by the Hash-MAC-DSDV mutual scheme, where the MAC addresses of individual devices are registered in the first phase and advertised in the network in the second phase. The proposed scheme allows legitimate devices to modify their routing table and unicast the one-way hash authentication mechanism to transfer their captured data from source towards the destination. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Hash-MAC-DSDV outweighs the existing schemes in terms of attack detection, energy consumption and communication metrics.

One of the operational challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) is load balancing, which is the focus of interest of this article. We propose a three-phase enhancedad hocon-demand distance vector (enhanced-AODV) routing protocol for multiwireless sensor networks (multi-WSNs). The three phases are categorized based on traffic priority, namely: 1) high priority; 2) low priority; and 3) ordinary network traffic. The network architecture is divided into chains, i.e., local and public chains, where the cluster heads (CHs) and base stations (BSs) are used, respectively, to manage the network traffic based on priority information with alternative route allocation. Moreover, our three-phase enhanced-AODV protocol provides traffic categorization with alternatives route allocation to minimize energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of participating devices in the network. The proposed model is implemented in the simulation environment to overview results statistics in terms of network lifetime, prioritize traffic, computation and communication costs, latency, and packet lost ratio (PLR). Findings from the simulation suggest that our scheme achieves 15% improvement in network lifetime, 17% latency, 22% PLR, and approximately 10% in the computation and communication costs of the network, in comparison to three other similar protocols.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is considered an enhancement of existing vehicular ad-hoc networks, which helps connect mobile vehicles to the Internet of Things (IoT) with the support of 5G networks. To assure the quality-of-service demand by the users, the edge computing paradigm of 5G networks can be incorporated in the IoV environment for supporting compute-intensive applications. The basic safety messages are typically transmitted using a multicast pattern in the IoV-enabled edge computing paradigm. The use of the multicast channel may accelerate the communication process; however, it is prone to various attacks due to the open nature of wireless networks. This article proposes a multimessage and multireceiver signcryption scheme for the multicast channel in a certificateless setting to solve the key escrow problem. The security of the partial private key is dependent on the secure channel, which increases the complexities of the system. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we introduce a new idea that does not require a secure channel. The key generation center only sends the pseudo partial private key of the users on a public channel. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is based on hyper-elliptic curve cryptography (HECC), which has much smaller key sizes as compared to elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The security proofs and performance comparison for our scheme are carried out. The findings show that the proposed scheme provides high security while using less computational and communication costs.

The social Internet of Things (IoT) (SIoT) helps to enable an autonomous interaction between the two architectures that have already been established: social networks and the IoT. SIoT also integrates the concepts of social networking and IoT into collaborative edge computing (CEC), the so-called CEC-based SIoT architecture. In closer proximity, IoT devices self-organize into a CEC-based SIoT computing cluster and provide social device-to-device (S-D2D) services, such as computation offloading, service discovery, and content delivery. In the CEC-based SIoT, however, cooperation based on social connections leads to a problem calledsocial and spatial physical trade-off. This problem is also referred to as themismatchproblem, which arises because the spatial neighbors in the social layer cannot always be related. The spatial distance thus calls for additional multi-hop transmissions. This work presents a novel solution called 3-D-social identifier structure(3-D-SIS)model. The 3-D-SIS model is based on 3-D social space (3-D-SS) and considers social ties and physical connections (i.e., intra-neighbor) of the SIoT devices and utilizes a 3-D structure to evaluate that relationship. Moreover, it minimizes the end-to-end delay and communication cost to address the mismatch problem. To validate the performance of the(3-D-SIS)model, we use the real traces of social networks(INFOCOM06). The results show that the 3-D-SIS selects the best neighbor in S-D2D communication and improves performance in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput.

In a cloud environment, the indemnity of service level agreement (SLA) violations has an adverse effect on the service provider. It leads to the penalty fee, credit amount, license extension, and reputation decline that could significantly impact future business outcomes. Existing approaches are unable to handle complex predictions that can accommodate the temporal influence of Quality of Service (QoS) data. Moreover, no method in a cloud environment considers all possible attitudinal behavior of the service provider to mitigate the risk of an actual violation. This article proposes an SLA violation risk mitigation model that uses ordered weighted average (OWA) in long short-term memory for complex QoS prediction. The OWA operator is weighted with a minimax disparity approach to manage the risk of SLA violation. The approach intelligently predicts deviation in custom prioritized QoS parameter and recommend exigency of mitigating action by considering all possible attitudinal behavior of the service provider. This article uses linguistic variables, fuzzy and interval numbers to handle imprecise information. The analysis results demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach to address complex risk mitigation actions.

With the potential of implementing computing-intensive applications, edge computing is combined with digital twinning (DT)-empowered Internet of vehicles (IoV) to enhance intelligent transportation capabilities. By updating digital twins of vehicles and offloading services to edge computing devices (ECDs), the insufficiency in vehicles’ computational resources can be complemented. However, owing to the computational intensity of DT-empowered IoV, ECD would overload under excessive service requests, which deteriorates the quality of service (QoS). To address this problem, in this article, a multiuser offloading system is analyzed, where the QoS is reflected through the response time of services. Then, a service offloading (SOL) method with deep reinforcement learning, is proposed for DT-empowered IoV in edge computing. To obtain optimized offloading decisions, SOL leverages deep Q-network (DQN), which combines the value function approximation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Eventually, experiments with comparative methods indicate that SOL is effective and adaptable in diverse environments.

Autonomous driving is considered one of the killer technologies in the intelligent era. The information transmission between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians (V2P) is very important to reduce the number of road accidents. Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) technology can be used to increase the vehicle (or driver) awareness regarding the presence of pedestrians in a crosswalk to realize short-distance transmission of emergency messages. On the other hand, highly secure transmission in V2P networks is required to assure the broadcasting of emergency messages. However, the artificial noise scheme by an additional noise source to improve the physical layer security (PLS) is not suitable due to the dynamic vehicles. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a source-noise assisted AmBC transmission scheme in the V2P system, in which the noise is created by the ambient radio frequency (RF) source to improve the PLS performance. The closed-form expressions for the outage probability of the legitimate user and the intercept probability of eavesdropper are derived. Finally, the diversity gain performance of the system is studied by analyzing the asymptotic behaviors. The theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the system security performance at the expense of system reliability by utilizing the proposed source-noise aided scheme in the V2P network. Besides, the optimal reflection coefficient is related to the power allocation ratio for the signal of the reader and interference noise. The different reflection coefficient is required for achieving the best system performance under different power allocation ratios. Moreover, the results also show that there are error floors for the outage probability, depending on the reflection coefficient. Furthermore, the performance results show that the intercept probability will significantly decrease when the outage probability is fixed in the proposed scheme.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, backed by resourceful fog computing, are capable of meeting the requirements of computationally-intensive tasks. However, many existing IoT applications are unable to perform well, due to different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, while communicating with the fog server. Besides, constantly changing traffic demands of applications is another challenge. For example, the demand for real-time applications includes communicating over a path that is less prone to delay, and applications that offload computationally intensive tasks to the fog server need a reliable path that has a lower probability of link failure. This results in a tradeoff between conflicting objectives that are constantly evolving, i.e., minimizing end-to-end delay and maximizing the reliability of paths between IoT devices and the fog server. We propose a novel approach that takes advantage of machine learning (ML) and multiobjective optimization (MOO)-based techniques. The reliability of links is evaluated using an ML-based algorithm in an software-defined network (SDN)-enabled multihop scenario for the IoT-fog environment. By considering the two conflicting objectives, the MOO algorithm is used to find the Pareto-optimal paths. Our experimental evaluation considers two applications with different QoS requirements-a real-time application (App-1) using UDP sockets and a task offloading application (App-2) using TCP sockets. Our results show that: 1) the tradeoff between the two objectives can be optimized and 2) the SDN controller was able to make adaptive decision on-the-fly to choose the best path from the Pareto-optimal set. The App-1 communicating over the selected path finished its execution in 13% less time than communicating over the shortest path. The App-2 had 41% less packet loss using the selected path compared to using the shortest path.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a key enabler for a wide range of smart applications. In IoT, a large number of heterogeneous devices form anad hocconnection with each other. Thead hocinfrastructure is considered an integral part of IoT-empowered applications because of its efficient, cost-effective, and dynamic nature. These networks need to ensure the quality of service using their limited resources, particularly in multihop communication. Because multihop communication can be an easy target of attackers, it needs a secure and reliable data transmission scheme. In this article, we propose a secured and reliable continuous transmission scheme for cognitive hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ)-aided IoT (SRCT-HARQ) capable of maintaining high throughput and lower delay. The SRCT-HARQ scheme is analytically modeled using a probability-based approach. The mathematical formulas are derived for delay and throughput using a probability-based analysis, and the results are verified using the Monte Carlo simulations. The performance results elaborate that the network throughput and delay are improved, mainly due to the proposed authentication scheme. Using our experimental results, we evaluated the optimal time for data transmission to protect the legal rights of primary users that resulted in improved performance.

Industry 5.0 is the digitalization, automation and data exchange of industrial processes that involve artificial intelligence, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (I-CPS). In healthcare, I-CPS enables the intelligent wearable devices to gather data from the real-world and transmit to the virtual world for decision-making. I-CPS makes our lives comfortable with the emergence of innovative healthcare applications. Similar to any other IIoT paradigm, I-CPS capable healthcare applications face numerous challenging issues. The resource-constrained nature of wearable devices and their inability to support complex security mechanisms provide an ideal platform to malevolent entities for launching attacks. To preserve the privacy of wearable devices and their data in an I-CPS environment, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme. Our scheme is based on client-server interaction model that uses symmetric encryption for establishing secured sessions among the communicating entities. After mutual authentication, the privacy risk associated with a patient data is predicted using an AI-enabled Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We analyzed the robustness and security of our scheme using BurrowsAbadiNeedham (BAN) logic. This analysis shows that the use of lightweight security primitives for the exchange of session keys makes the proposed scheme highly resilient in terms of security, efficiency, and robustness. Finally, the proposed scheme incurs nominal overhead in terms of processing, communication and storage and is capable to combat a wide range of adversarial threats.

The papers in this special section focus on configuration security for industrial automation and control systems. These systems include supervisory control and data acquisition systems, distributed control systems, and other control system configurations such as programmable logic controllers, which are typically used in industries such as electric, water and wastewater, oil and natural gas, transportation, chemical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and discrete manufacturing, examples of which are automotive, aerospace, and durable goods. These systems are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in complex ways, both physically and through information and communications technologies, and they support a diverse set of services for the management of critical infrastructure by making use of a wide variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for sensing and actuation. These papers highlight the main research challenges and solutions for improving configuration security in the context of industrial automation and control systems by taking into consideration various challenges faced by industrial applications.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ensures reliable and efficient data exchanges among the industrial processes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the cyber-physical systems. In the IIoT ecosystem, devices of industrial applications communicate with each other with little human intervention. They need to act intelligently to safeguard the data confidentiality and devices' authenticity. The ability to gather, process, and store real-time data depends on the quality of data, network connectivity, and processing capabilities of these devices. Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC) is gaining popularity nowadays due to the resource limitations imposed on the sensor-embedded IIoT devices. PEC processes the gathered data at the network edge to reduce the response time for these devices. However, PEC faces numerous research challenges in terms of secured communication, network connectivity, and resource utilization of the edge servers. To address these challenges, we propose a secured and intelligent communication scheme for PEC in an IIoT-enabled infrastructure. In the proposed scheme, forged identities of adversaries, i.e., Sybil devices, are detected by IIoT devices and shared with edge servers to prevent upstream transmission of their malicious data. Upon Sybil attack detection, each edge server executes a parallel Artificial Bee Colony (pABC) algorithm to perform optimal network configuration of IIoT devices. Each edge server performs the job migration to their neighboring servers for load balancing and better network performance, based on their processing and storage capabilities. The experimental results justify the efficiency of our proposed scheme in terms of Sybil attack detection, the convergence curves of our pABC algorithm, delay, throughput, and control overhead of data communication using PEC for IIoT.

A novel intelligent navigation technique for accurate image-guided COVID-19 lung biopsy is addressed, which systematically combines augmented reality (AR), customized haptic-enabled surgical tools, and deep neural network to achieve customized surgical navigation. Clinic data from 341 COVID-19 positive patients, with 1598 negative control group, have collected for the model synergy and evaluation. Biomechanics force data from the experiment are applied a WPD-CNN-LSTM (WCL) to learn a new patient-specific COVID-19 surgical model, and the ResNet was employed for the intraoperative force classification. To boost the user immersion and promote the user experience, intro-operational guiding images have combined with the haptic-AR navigational view. Furthermore, a 3-D user interface (3DUI), including all requisite surgical details, was developed with a real-time response guaranteed. Twenty-four thoracic surgeons were invited to the objective and subjective experiments for performance evaluation. The root-mean-square error results of our proposed WCL model is 0.0128, and the classification accuracy is 97%, which demonstrated that the innovative AR with deep learning (DL) intelligent model outperforms the existing perception navigation techniques with significantly higher performance. This article shows a novel framework in the interventional surgical integration for COVID-19 and opens the new research about the integration of AR, haptic rendering, and deep learning for surgical navigation.

Roadside cameras in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are used for various purposes, e.g., monitoring the speed of vehicles, violations of laws, and detection of suspicious activities in parking lots, streets, and side roads. These cameras generate big multimedia data, and as a result, the ITS faces challenges like data management, redundancy, and privacy breaching in end-to-end communication. To solve these challenges, we propose a framework, called SPEED, based on a multi-level edge computing architecture and machine learning algorithms. In this framework, data captured by end-devices, e.g., smart cameras, is distributed among multiple Level-One Edge Devices (LOEDs) to deal with data management issue and minimize packet drop due to buffer overflowing on end-devices and LOEDs. The data is forwarded from LOEDs to Level-Two Edge Devices (LTEDs) in a compressed sensed format. The LTEDs use an online Least-Squares Support-Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) model to determine distribution characteristics and index values of compressed sensed data to preserve its privacy during transmission between LTEDs and High-Level Edge Devices (HLEDs). The HLEDs estimate the redundancy in forwarded data using a deep learning architecture, i.e., a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN is used to detect the presence of moving objects in the forwarded data. If a movement is detected, the data is forwarded to cloud servers for further analysis otherwise discarded. Experimental results show that the use of a multi-level edge computing architecture helps in managing the generated data. The machine learning algorithms help in addressing issues like data redundancy and privacy-preserving in end-to-end communication.

Summary Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Virtualization (NV) are emerged paradigms that simplified the control and management of the next generation networks, most importantly, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, and Cyber‐Physical Systems. The Internet of Things (IoT) includes a diverse range of a vast collection of heterogeneous devices that require interoperable communication, scalable platforms, and security provisioning. Security provisioning to an SDN‐based IoT network poses a real security challenge leading to various serious security threats due to the connection of various heterogeneous devices having a wide range of access protocols. Furthermore, the logical centralized controlled intelligence of the SDN architecture represents a plethora of security challenges due to its single point of failure. It may throw the entire network into chaos and thus expose it to various known and unknown security threats and attacks. Security of SDN controlled IoT environment is still in infancy and thus remains the prime research agenda for both the industry and academia. This paper comprehensively reviews the current state‐of‐the‐art security threats, vulnerabilities, and issues at the control plane. Moreover, this paper contributes by presenting a detailed classification of various security attacks on the control layer. A comprehensive state‐of‐the‐art review of the latest mitigation techniques for various security breaches is also presented. Finally, this paper presents future research directions and challenges for further investigation down the line.

Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) applications generate huge volumes of multimedia data that are uploaded to cloud servers for storage and processing. During the uploading process, the IoMT applications face three major challenges, i.e., node management, privacy-preserving, and network protection. In this article, we propose a multilayer framework (PAAL) based on a multilevel edge computing architecture to manage end and edge devices, preserve the privacy of end-devices and data, and protect the underlying network from external attacks. The proposed framework has three layers. In the first layer, the underlying network is partitioned into multiple clusters to manage end-devices and level-one edge devices (LOEDs). In the second layer, the LOEDs apply an efficient aggregation technique to reduce the volumes of generated data and preserve the privacy of end-devices. The privacy of sensitive information in aggregated data is protected through a local differential privacy-based technique. In the last layer, the mobile sinks are registered with a level-two edge device via a handshaking mechanism to protect the underlying network from external threats. Experimental results show that the proposed framework performs better as compared to existing frameworks in terms of managing the nodes, preserving the privacy of end-devices and sensitive information, and protecting the underlying network.

Industrial Internet of Things applications demand trustworthiness in terms of quality of service (QoS), security, and privacy, to support the smooth transmission of data. To address these challenges, in this article, we propose a distributed and anonymous data collection (DaaC) framework based on a multilevel edge computing architecture. This framework distributes captured data among multiple level-one edge devices (LOEDs) to improve the QoS and minimize packet drop and end-to-end delay. Mobile sinks are used to collect data from LOEDs and upload to cloud servers. Before data collection, the mobile sinks are registered with a level-two edge-device to protect the underlying network. The privacy of mobile sinks is preserved through group-based signed data collection requests. Experimental results show that our proposed framework improves QoS through distributed data transmission. It also helps in protecting the underlying network through a registration scheme and preserves the privacy of mobile sinks through group-based data collection requests.

An Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) architecture aims to provide a support for real-time multimedia applications by using wireless multimedia sensor nodes that are deployed for a long-term usage. These nodes are capable of capturing both multimedia and nonmultimedia data, and form a network known as Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN). In a WMSN, underlying routing protocols need to provide an acceptable level of Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia traffic. In this paper, we propose a Seamless and Authorized Streaming (SAMS) framework for a cluster-based hierarchical WMSN. The SAMS uses authentication at different levels to form secured clusters. The formation of these clusters allows only legitimate nodes to transmit captured data to their Cluster Heads (CHs). Each node senses the environment, stores captured data in its buffer, and waits for its turn to transmit to its CH. This waiting may result in an excessive packet-loss and end-to-end delay for multimedia traffic. To address these issues, a channel allocation approach is proposed for an intercluster communication. In the case of a buffer overflow, a member node in one cluster switches to a neighboring CH provided that the latter has an available channel for allocation. The experimental results show that the SAMS provides an acceptable level of QoS and enhances security of an underlying network.

The concept of Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) is becoming popular nowadays and can be used in various smart city applications, e.g., traffic management, healthcare, and surveillance. In the IoMT, the devices, e.g., Multimedia Sensor Nodes (MSNs), are capable of generating both multimedia and non-multimedia data. The generated data are forwarded to a cloud server via a Base Station (BS). However, it is possible that the Internet connection between the BS and the cloud server may be temporarily down. The limited computational resources restrict the MSNs from holding the captured data for a longer time. In this situation, mobile sinks can be utilized to collect data from MSNs and upload to the cloud server. However, this data collection may create privacy issues, such as revealing identities and location information of MSNs. Therefore, there is a need to preserve the privacy of MSNs during mobile data collection. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving-based data collection and analysis (P2DCA) framework for IoMT applications. The proposed framework partitions an underlying wireless multimedia sensor network into multiple clusters. Each cluster is represented by a Cluster Head (CH). The CHs are responsible to protect the privacy of member MSNs through data and location coordinates aggregation. Later, the aggregated multimedia data are analyzed on the cloud server using a counter-propagation artificial neural network to extract meaningful information through segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the existing privacy-preserving schemes, and can be used to collect multimedia data in various IoMT applications.

The encoding of HD videos faces two challenges: requirements for a strong processing power and a large storage space. One time-efficient solution addressing these challenges is to use a cloud platform and to use a scalable video coding technique to generate multiple video streams with varying bit-rates. Packet-loss is very common during the transmission of these video streams over the Internet and becomes another challenge. One solution to address this challenge is to retransmit lost video packets, but this will create end-to-end delay. Therefore, it would be good if the problem of packet-loss can be dealt with at the user's side. In this paper, we present a novel system that encodes and stores the videos using the Amazon cloud computing platform, and recover lost video frames on user side using a new Error Concealment (EC) technique. To efficiently utilize the computation power of a user's mobile device, the EC is performed based on a multiple-thread and parallel process. The simulation results clearly show that, on average, our proposed EC technique outperforms the traditional Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) and the Frame Copy (FC) techniques.

With the emergence of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), the distribution of multimedia contents have now become a reality. Without proper management, the transmission of multimedia data over WMSNs affects the performance of networks due to excessive packet-drop. The existing studies on Quality of Service (QoS) mostly deal with simple Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and as such do not account for an increasing number of sensor nodes and an increasing volume of data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to support QoS in WMSNs along with a light-weight Error Concealment (EC) scheme. The EC schemes play a vital role to enhance Quality of Experience (QoE) by maintaining an acceptable quality at the receiving ends. The main objectives of the proposed framework are to maximize the network throughput and to cover-up the effects produced by dropped video packets. To control the data-rate, Scalable High efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is applied at multimedia sensor nodes with variable Quantization Parameters (QPs). Multi-path routing is exploited to support real-time video transmission. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can efficiently adjust large volumes of video data under certain network distortions and can effectively conceal lost video frames by producing better objective measurements.

Summary Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource‐starving miniature sensor nodes deployed in a remote and hostile environment. These networks operate on small batteries for days, months, and even years depending on the requirements of monitored applications. The battery‐powered operation and inaccessible human terrains make it practically infeasible to recharge the nodes unless some energy‐scavenging techniques are used. These networks experience threats at various layers and, as such, are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The resource‐constrained nature of sensor nodes, inaccessible human terrains, and error‐prone communication links make it obligatory to design lightweight but robust and secured schemes for these networks. In view of these limitations, we aim to design an extremely lightweight payload‐based mutual authentication scheme for a cluster‐based hierarchical WSN. The proposed scheme, also known as payload‐based mutual authentication for WSNs, operates in 2 steps. First, an optimal percentage of cluster heads is elected, authenticated, and allowed to communicate with neighboring nodes. Second, each cluster head, in a role of server, authenticates the nearby nodes for cluster formation. We validate our proposed scheme using various simulation metrics that outperform the existing schemes.

The Internet of Things is a vision that broadens the scope of the internet by incorporating physical objects to identify themselves to the participating entities. This innovative concept enables a physical device to represent itself in the digital world. There are a lot of speculations and future forecasts about the Internet of Things devices. However, most of them are vendor specific and lack a unified standard, which renders their seamless integration and interoperable operations. Another major concern is the lack of security features in these devices and their corresponding products. Most of them are resource-starved and unable to support computationally complex and resource consuming secure algorithms. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight mutual authentication scheme which validates the identities of the participating devices before engaging them in communication for the resource observation. Our scheme incurs less connection overhead and provides a robust defence solution to combat various types of attacks.