ABSTRACT Different small or large‐scale enterprises came to the conclusion that moving data to the cloud is more convenient. In recent decades, AWS and Azure have tried their best to provide comparatively affordable and instant solutions. Both cloud platforms are extensive to understand, so it is difficult for users to make the right choice because of data confidentiality, better storage capacity, and, most importantly, to select a reasonable platform. This paper is an in‐depth analysis of the comparable capabilities and services offered by Azure and AWS. The strengths and weaknesses of both platforms are highlighted considering security, storage, pricing, and machine learning services. It critically examines the implementation of the linear regression model and its performance. Furthermore, a survey was conducted to ensure that the users know which cloud service provider is preferred. On the basis of machine learning services, people with more experience in the cloud preferred Azure Machine Learning Studio over Amazon SageMaker. Azure outperformed AWS, achieving an accuracy of 70%, whereas AWS managed only 60%. Similarly, in cases of security, storage, and pricing, Azure was preferred because of its flexible, easy‐to‐use services. Therefore, from the methodology, it is concluded that Azure was preferred over AWS. However, the right choice can only be made by considering the business needs.

Abstract A massive amount of information explosion over the internet has caused a possible difficulty of information overload. To overcome this, Recommender systems are systematic tools that are rapidly being employed in several domains such as movies, travel, E-commerce, and music. In the existing research, several methods have been proposed for single-user modeling, however, the massive rise of social connections potentially increases the significance of group recommender systems (GRS). A GRS is one that jointly recommends a list of items to a collection of individuals based on their interests. Moreover, the single-user model poses several challenges to recommender systems such as data sparsity, cold start, and long tail problems. On the contrary hand, another hotspot for group-based recommendation is the modeling of user preferences and interests based on the groups to which they belong using effective aggregation strategies. To address such issues, a novel “KGR” group recommender system based on user-trust relations is proposed in this study using kernel mapping techniques. In the proposed model, user-trust networks or relations are exploited to generate trust-based groups of users which is one of the important behavioral and social aspects. More precisely, in KGR the group kernels and group residual matrices are exploited as well as seeking a multi-linear mapping between encoded vectors of group-item interactions and probability density function indicating how groups will rate the items. Moreover, to emphasize the relevance of individual preferences of users in a group to which they belong, a hybrid approach is also suggested in which group kernels and individual user kernels are merged as additive and multiplicative models. Furthermore, the proposed KGR is validated on two different trust-based datasets including Film Trust and CiaoDVD. In addition, KGR outperforms with an RMSE value of 0.3306 and 0.3013 on FilmTrust and CiaoDVD datasets which are lower than the 1.8176 and 1.1092 observed with the original KMR.

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is highly dynamic due to the high speed and sparse distribution of vehicles on the road. This creates major challenges (e.g., network fragmentation, packet routing) for the researchers to enable robust, reliable, and scalable communication, especially in a highly dense network. Clustering in VANET is one of the remedies to address the scalability issue. However, it is observed in the literature, that existing clustering techniques produce a high number of clusters for the vehicular environment. Consequently, it increases the consumption of scarce resources in a wireless network. Furthermore, it also increases the communication overhead as well as the number of hops for data routing. As a result communication latency also increases and the reliability of communication protocol decreases. So it is highly desirable to find out the optimal clusters for a given vehicular environment. As finding optimal clusters is a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem, therefore by employing nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithms we can optimize the multi-objective problem. To this end, we proposed a novel clustering algorithm based on the Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) algorithm for VANET (HHOCNET). HHO algorithm is a nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging maneuver of hawks called surprise pounce. The proposed framework imitates the cooperative foraging maneuver of hawks (i.e., surprise pounce for creating optimized vehicular clusters). The stochastic operators of the HHO algorithm and proper maintenance of the equilibrium state between the operations of exploration and exploitation enable the proposed algorithm to escape from the local optima and provide a globally optimal solution (i.e., the optimal number of vehicular clusters). Simulations are performed in MATLAB and the results are compared with the state-of-art schemes (i.e., Gray Wolf optimization-based clustering algorithm (GWOCNET), Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MO, PSO), and Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (CLPSO)) using different performance metrics. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is an effective approach for clustering in VANET and outer performs the other benchmark algorithms in terms of optimizing the multi-objective clustering problem. HHOCNET algorithm selects 36.04% of nodes as cluster heads while the existing state-of-the-art schemes are providing 50.42%, 56.7%, and 60.89% for GWOCNET, CLPSO, and Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO). The proposed HHOCNET algorithm enhances the performance of the vehicular network by up to 15%. Consequently, it increases network efficiency by reducing the consumption of the required wireless resources. It also reduces the number of hops for packet routing. Hence it achieves a minimum end-to-end communication latency.

Technology advancement in the field of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) improves smart transportation along with its many other applications. Routing in VANETs is difficult as compared to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs); topological constraints such as high mobility, node density, and frequent path failure make the VANET routing more challenging. To scale complex routing problems, where static and dynamic routings do not work well, AI-based clustering techniques are introduced. Evolutionary algorithm-based clustering techniques are used to solve such routing problems; moth flame optimization is one of them. In this work, an intelligent moth flame optimization-based clustering (IMOC) for a drone-assisted vehicular network is proposed. This technique is used to provide maximum coverage for the vehicular node with minimum cluster heads (CHs) required for routing. Delivering optimal route by providing end-to-end connectivity with minimum overhead is the core issue addressed in this article. Node density, grid size, and transmission ranges are the performance metrics used for comparative analysis. These parameters were varied during simulations for each algorithm, and the results were recorded. A comparison was done with state-of-the-art clustering algorithms for routing such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (CLPSO), and Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO). Experimental outcomes for IMOC consistently outperformed the state-of-the-art techniques for each scenario. A framework is also proposed with the support of a commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to improve routing by minimizing path creation overhead in VANETs. UAV support for clustering improved end-to-end connectivity by keeping the routing cost constant for intercluster communication in the same grid.