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Wireless technologies are being introduced in industrial applications since they provide certain benefits, such as the flexibility to modify the layout of the nodes, improving connectivity with monitoring and decision nodes, adapting to mobile devices and reducing or eliminating cabling. However, companies are still reluctant to use them in time-critical applications, and consequently, more research is needed in order to be massively deployed in industrial environments. This paper goes in this direction by presenting a novel wireless acquisition system aimed at industrial applications. This system embeds a low-cost technology, such as XBee, not frequently considered for deterministic applications, for deploying industrial applications that must fulfill certain QoS requirements. The use of XBee 900 MHz modules allows for the use of the 2.4 GHz band for other purposes, such as connecting to cloud services, without causing interferences with critical applications. The system implements a time-slotted media access (TDMA) approach with a timely transmission scheduling of the messages on top of the XBee 900 MHz technology. The paper discusses the details of the acquisition system, including the topology, the nodes involved, the so-called coordinator node and smart measuring nodes, and the design of the frames. Smart measuring nodes are implemented by an original PCB which were specifically designed and manufactured. This board eases the connection of the sensors to the acquisition system. Experimental tests were carried out to validate the presented wireless acquisition system. Its applicability is shown in an industrial scenario for monitoring the positioning of an aeronautical reconfigurable tooling prototype. Both wired and wireless technologies were used to compare the variables monitored. The results proved that the followed approach may be an alternative for monitoring big machinery in indoor industrial environments, becoming especially suitable for acquiring values from sensors located in mobile parts or difficult-to-reach places. This research was funded by the Basque Government, through the project EKOHEGAZ (ELKARTEK KK-2021/00092), Diputación Foral de Álava (DFA) through the project CONAVANTER, and to the UPV/EHU through the project GIU20/063.

Recently, the integration of state-of-the-art technologies, such as modern sensors, networks, and cloud computing, has revolutionized the conventional healthcare system. However, security concerns have increasingly been emerging due to the integration of technologies. Therefore, the security and privacy issues associated with e-health data must be properly explored. In this paper, to investigate the security and privacy of e-health systems, we identified major components of the modern e-health systems (i.e., e-health data, medical devices, medical networks and edge/fog/cloud). Then, we reviewed recent security and privacy studies that focus on each component of the e-health systems. Based on the review, we obtained research taxonomy, security concerns, requirements, solutions, research trends, and open challenges for the components with strengths and weaknesses of the analyzed studies. In particular, edge and fog computing studies for e-health security and privacy were reviewed since the studies had mostly not been analyzed in other survey papers.

Edge-cloud collaborative inference can significantly reduce the delay of a deep neural network (DNN) by dividing the network between mobile edge and cloud. However, the in-layer data size of DNN is usually larger than the original data, so the communication time to send intermediate data to the cloud will also increase end-to-end latency. To cope with these challenges, this paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network structure—BBNet—that accelerates collaborative inference from two levels: (1) through channel-pruning: reducing the number of calculations and parameters of the original network, (2) through compressing the feature map at the split point to further reduce the size of the data transmitted. In addition, This paper implemented the BBNet structure based on NVIDIA Nano and the server. Compared with the original network, BBNet’s FLOPs and parameter achieve up to 5.67× and 11.57× on the compression rate, respectively. In the best case, the feature compression layer can reach a bit-compression rate of 512×. Compared with the better bandwidth conditions, BBNet has a more obvious inference delay when the network conditions are poor. For example, when the upload bandwidth is only 20 kb/s, the end-to-end latency of BBNet is increased by 38.89× compared with the cloud-only approach.

Blockchain is a disruptive technology for shaping the next era of a healthcare system striving for efficient and effective patient care. This is thanks to its peer-to-peer, secure, and transparent characteristics. On the other hand, cloud computing made its way into the healthcare system thanks to its elasticity and cost-efficiency nature. However, cloud-based systems fail to provide a secured and private patient-centric cohesive view to multiple healthcare stakeholders. In this situation, blockchain provides solutions to address security and privacy concerns of the cloud because of its decentralization feature combined with data security and privacy, while cloud provides solutions to the blockchain scalability and efficiency challenges. Therefore a novel paradigm of blockchain-cloud integration (BcC) emerges for the domain of healthcare. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the BcC integration for the healthcare system to give the readers the motivations behind the emergence of this new paradigm, introduce a classification of existing architectures and their applications for better healthcare. We then review the development platforms and services and highlight the research challenges for the integrated BcC architecture, possible solutions, and future research directions. The results of this paper will be useful for the healthcare industry to design and develop a data management system for better patient care.

Processing IoT applications directly in the cloud may not be the most efficient solution for each IoT scenario, especially for time-sensitive applications. A promising alternative is to use fog and edge computing, which address the issue of managing the large data bandwidth needed by end devices. These paradigms impose to process the large amounts of generated data close to the data sources rather than in the cloud. One of the considerations of cloud-based IoT environments is resource management, which typically revolves around resource allocation, workload balance, resource provisioning, task scheduling, and QoS to achieve performance improvements. In this paper, we review resource management techniques that can be applied for cloud, fog, and edge computing. The goal of this review is to provide an evaluation framework of metrics for resource management algorithms aiming at the cloud/fog and edge environments. To this end, we first address research challenges on resource management techniques in that domain. Consequently, we classify current research contributions to support in conducting an evaluation framework. One of the main contributions is an overview and analysis of research papers addressing resource management techniques. Concluding, this review highlights opportunities of using resource management techniques within the cloud/fog/edge paradigm. This practice is still at early development and barriers need to be overcome.

Microservices, Continuous Integration and Delivery, Docker, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code—these are the current trends and buzzwords in the technological world of 2020. A popular tool which can facilitate the deployment and maintenance of microservices is Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a platform for running containerized applications, for example microservices. There are two main questions which answer was important for us: how to deploy Kubernetes itself and how to ensure that the deployment fulfils the needs of a production environment. Our research concentrates on the analysis and evaluation of Kubernetes cluster as the software production environment. However, firstly it is necessary to determine and evaluate the requirements of production environment. The paper presents the determination and analysis of such requirements and their evaluation in the case of Kubernetes cluster. Next, the paper compares two methods of deploying a Kubernetes cluster: kops and eksctl. Both of the methods concern the AWS cloud, which was chosen mainly because of its wide popularity and the range of provided services. Besides the two chosen methods of deployment, there are many more, including the DIY method and deploying on-premises.

Industrial IoT has special communication requirements, including high reliability, low latency, flexibility, and security. These are instinctively provided by the 5G mobile technology, making it a successful candidate for supporting Industrial IoT (IIoT) scenarios. The aim of this paper is to identify current research challenges and solutions in relation to 5G-enabled Industrial IoT, based on the initial requirements and promises of both domains. The methodology of the paper follows the steps of surveying state-of-the art, comparing results to identify further challenges, and drawing conclusions as lessons learned for each research domain. These areas include IIoT applications and their requirements, mobile edge cloud, back-end performance tuning, network function virtualization, and security, blockchains for IIoT, Artificial Intelligence support for 5G, and private campus networks. Beside surveying the current challenges and solutions, the paper aims to provide meaningful comparisons for each of these areas (in relation to 5G-enabled IIoT) to draw conclusions on current research gaps.

Recently, using advanced cryptographic techniques to process, store, and share datasecurely in an untrusted cloud environment has drawn widespread attention from academicresearchers. In particular, Ciphertext‐Policy Attribute‐Based Encryption (CP‐ABE) is a promising,advanced type of encryption technique that resolves an open challenge to regulate fine‐grainedaccess control of sensitive data according to attributes, particularly for Internet of Things (IoT)applications. However, although this technique provides several critical functions such as dataconfidentiality and expressiveness, it faces some hurdles including revocation issues and lack ofmanaging a wide range of attributes. These two issues have been highlighted by many existingstudies due to their complexity which is hard to address without high computational cost affectingthe resource‐limited IoT devices. In this paper, unlike other survey papers, existing single andmultiauthority CP‐ABE schemes are reviewed with the main focus on their ability to address therevocation issues, the techniques used to manage the revocation, and comparisons among themaccording to a number of secure cloud storage criteria. Therefore, this is the first review paperanalysing the major issues of CP‐ABE in the IoT paradigm and explaining the existing approachesto addressing these issues.

Calculation of structural features of proteins, nucleic acids, and nucleic acid-protein complexes on the basis of their geometries and studying various interactions within these macromolecules, for which high-resolution structures are stored in Protein Data Bank (PDB), require parsing and extraction of suitable data stored in text files. To perform these operations on large scale in the face of the growing amount of macromolecular data in public repositories, we propose to perform them in the distributed environment of Azure Data Lake and scale the calculations on the Cloud. In this paper, we present dedicated data extractors for PDB files that can be used in various types of calculations performed over protein and nucleic acids structures in the Azure Data Lake. Results of our tests show that the Cloud storage space occupied by the macromolecular data can be successfully reduced by using compression of PDB files without significant loss of data processing efficiency. Moreover, our experiments show that the performed calculations can be significantly accelerated when using large sequential files for storing macromolecular data and by parallelizing the calculations and data extractions that precede them. Finally, the paper shows how all the calculations can be performed in a declarative way in U-SQL scripts for Data Lake Analytics.

In recent years, cloud computing and fog computing have appeared one after the other, as promising technologies for augmenting the computing capability of devices locally. By offloading computational tasks to fog servers or cloud servers, the time for task processing decreases greatly. Thus, to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) of smart manufacturing systems, fog servers are deployed at network edge to provide fog computing services. In this paper, we study the following problems in a mixed computing system: (1) which computing mode should be chosen for a task in local computing, fog computing or cloud computing? (2) In the fog computing mode, what is the execution sequence for the tasks cached in a task queue? Thus, to solve the problems above, we design a Software-Defined Network (SDN) framework in a smart factory based on an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) system. A method based on Computing Mode Selection (CMS) and execution sequences based on the task priority (ASTP) is proposed in this paper. First, a CMS module is designed in the SDN controller and then, after operating the CMS algorithm, each task obtains an optimal computing mode. Second, the task priorities can be calculated according to their real-time performance and calculated amount. According to the task priority, the SDN controller sends a flow table to the SDN switch to complete the task transmission. In other words, the higher the task priority is, the earlier the fog computing service is obtained. Finally, a series of experiments and simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our method can achieve real-time performance and high reliability in IIoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for devices around the world to acquire information and store it, in order to be able to use it at a later stage. However, this potential opportunity is often not exploited because of the excessively big interval between the data collection and the capability to process and analyse it. In this paper, we review the current IoT technologies, approaches and models in order to discover what challenges need to be met to make more sense of data. The main goal of this paper is to review the surveys related to IoT in order to provide well integrated and context aware intelligent services for IoT. Moreover, we present a state-of-the-art of IoT from the context aware perspective that allows the integration of IoT and social networks in the emerging Social Internet of Things (SIoT) term. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER) under the granted Project SEQUOIA-UA (Management requirements and methodology for Big Data analytics) TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R, by the University of Alicante, within the program of support for research, under project GRE14-10, and by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain, within the program of support for research, under project GV/2016/087. This work has also been partially funded by projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity TIN2015-65100-R and DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001).

Climate change is stated as one of the largest issues of our time, resulting in many unwanted effects on life on earth. Cloud fractional cover (CFC), the portion of the sky covered by clouds, might affect global warming and different other aspects of human society such as agriculture and solar energy production. It is therefore important to improve the projection of future CFC, which is usually projected using numerical climate methods. In this paper, we explore the potential of using machine learning as part of a statistical downscaling framework to project future CFC. We are not aware of any other research that has explored this. We evaluated the potential of two different methods, a convolutional long short-term memory model (ConvLSTM) and a multiple regression equation, to predict CFC from other environmental variables. The predictions were associated with much uncertainty indicating that there might not be much information in the environmental variables used in the study to predict CFC. Overall the regression equation performed the best, but the ConvLSTM was the better performing model along some coastal and mountain areas. All aspects of the research analyses are explained including data preparation, model development, ML training, performance evaluation and visualization.

For the engineering application of manipulator grasping objects, mechanical arm occlusion and limited imaging angle produce various holes in the reconstructed 3D point clouds of objects. Acquiring a complete point cloud model of the grasped object plays a very important role in the subsequent task planning of the manipulator. This paper proposes a method with which to automatically detect and repair the holes in the 3D point cloud model of symmetrical objects grasped by the manipulator. With the established virtual camera coordinate system and boundary detection, repair and classification of holes, the closed boundaries for the nested holes were detected and classified into two kinds, which correspond to the mechanical claw holes caused by mechanical arm occlusion and the missing surface produced by limited imaging angle. These two kinds of holes were repaired based on surface reconstruction and object symmetry. Experiments on simulated and real point cloud models demonstrate that our approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art 3D point cloud hole repair algorithms.

Through the latest technological and conceptual developments, the centralized cloud-computing approach has moved to structures such as edge, fog, and the Internet of Things (IoT), approaching end users. As mobile network operators (MNOs) implement the new 5G standards, enterprise computing function shifts to the edge. In parallel to interconnection topics, there is the issue of global impact over the environment. The idea is to develop IoT devices to eliminate the greenhouse effect of current applications. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the technology that has this potential, and it can be used in applications ranging from identifying a person to granting access in a building. Past studies have focused on how to improve RFID communication or to achieve maximal throughput. However, for many applications, system latency and availability are critical aspects. This paper examines, through stochastic Petri nets (SPNs), the availability, dependability, and latency of an object-identification system that uses RFID tags. Through the performed analysis, the optimal balance between latency and throughput was identified. Analyzing multiple communication scenarios revealed the availability of such a system when deployed at the edge layer.

Computation offloading technology extends cloud computing to the edge of the access network close to users, bringing many benefits to terminal devices with limited battery and computational resources. Nevertheless, the existing computation offloading approaches are challenging to apply to specific scenarios, such as the dense distribution of end-users and the sparse distribution of network infrastructure. The technological revolution in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and chip industry has granted UAVs more computing resources and promoted the emergence of UAV-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) technology, which could be applied to those scenarios. However, in the MEC system with multiple users and multiple servers, making reasonable offloading decisions and allocating system resources is still a severe challenge. This paper studies the offloading decision and resource allocation problem in the UAV-assisted MEC environment with multiple users and servers. To ensure the quality of service for end-users, we set the weighted total cost of delay, energy consumption, and the size of discarded tasks as our optimization objective. We further formulate the joint optimization problem as a Markov decision process and apply the soft actor–critic (SAC) deep reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize the offloading policy. Numerical simulation results show that the offloading policy optimized by our proposed SAC-based dynamic computing offloading (SACDCO) algorithm effectively reduces the delay, energy consumption, and size of discarded tasks for the UAV-assisted MEC system. Compared with the fixed local-UAV scheme in the specific simulation setting, our proposed approach reduces system delay and energy consumption by approximately 50% and 200%, respectively.

Since 2020, the master’s program “Multiple Sclerosis Management” has been running at Dresden International University, offering structured training to become a multiple sclerosis specialist. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many planned teaching formats had to be changed to online teaching. The subject of this paper was the investigation of a cloud-based digital hub and student evaluation of the program. Authors analyzed use cases of computer-supported collaborative learning and student evaluation of courses and modules using the Gioia method and descriptive statistics. The use of a cloud-based digital hub as a central data platform proved to be highly successful for learning and teaching, as well as for close interaction between lecturers and students. Students rated the courses very positively in terms of content, knowledge transfer and interaction. The implementation of the master’s program was successful despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting extensive use of digital tools demonstrates the “new normal” of future learning, with even more emphasis on successful online formats that also increase interaction between lecturers and students in particular. At the same time, there will continue to be tailored face-to-face events to specifically increase learning success.

Implicit authentication mechanisms are expected to prevent security and privacy threats for mobile devices using behavior modeling. However, recently, researchers have demonstrated that the performance of behavioral biometrics is insufficiently accurate. Furthermore, the unique characteristics of mobile devices, such as limited storage and energy, make it subject to constrained capacity of data collection and processing. In this paper, we propose an implicit authentication architecture based on edge computing, coined Edge computing-based mobile Device Implicit Authentication (EDIA), which exploits edge-based gait biometric identification using a deep learning model to authenticate users. The gait data captured by a device’s accelerometer and gyroscope sensors is utilized as the input of our optimized model, which consists of a CNN and a LSTM in tandem. Especially, we deal with extracting the features of gait signal in a two-dimensional domain through converting the original signal into an image, and then input it into our network. In addition, to reduce computation overhead of mobile devices, the model for implicit authentication is generated on the cloud server, and the user authentication process also takes place on the edge devices. We evaluate the performance of EDIA under different scenarios where the results show that i) we achieve a true positive rate of 97.77% and also a 2% false positive rate, and ii) EDIA still reaches high accuracy with limited dataset size.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is becoming prevalent in Internet of Thing (IoT) platforms due to its low-cost low-latency advantages over cloud-based solutions. However, P2P networking suffers from several critical security flaws that expose devices to remote attacks, eavesdropping and credential theft due to malicious peers who actively work to compromise networks. Therefore, trust and reputation management systems are emerging to address this problem. However, most systems struggle to identify new smart models of malicious peers, especially those who cooperate together to harm other peers. This paper proposes an intelligent trust management system, namely, Trutect, to tackle this issue. Trutect exploits the power of neural networks to provide recommendations on the trustworthiness of each peer. The system identifies the specific model of an individual peer, whether good or malicious. The system also detects malicious collectives and their suspicious group members. The experimental results show that compared to rival trust management systems, Trutect raises the success rates of good peers at a significantly lower running time. It is also capable of accurately identifying the peer model.

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)., In 2019, a new virus, SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 disease, was discovered. Asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients were forced to quarantine and closely monitor their symptoms and vital signs, most of the time at home. This paper describes e-CoVig, a novel mHealth application, developed as an alternative to the current monitoring paradigm, where the patients are followed up by direct phone contact. The e-CoVig provides a set of functionalities for remote reporting of symptoms, vital signs, and other clinical information to the health services taking care of these patients. The application is designed to register and transmit the heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), body temperature, respiration, and cough. The system features a mobile application, a web/cloud platform, and a low-cost specific device to acquire the temperature and SpO2. The architecture of the system is flexible and can be configured for different operation conditions. Current commercial devices, such as oximeters and thermometers, can also be used and read using the optical character recognition (OCR) functionality of the system. The data acquired at the mobile application are sent automatically to the web/cloud application and made available in real-time to the medical staff, enabling the follow-up of several users simultaneously without the need for time consuming phone call interactions. The system was already tested for its feasibility and a preliminary deployment was performed on a nursing home showing promising results., This work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under the grants e-CoVig—Project 255_596880547, and LARSyS—Project UIDB/50009/2020, by FCT/MCTES through national funds and, when applicable, co-funded EU funds under the grant NICE-HOME—Project UIDB/50008/2020, and by the IT—Instituto de Telecomunicações under grant BI/No. 13—19 May 2020 “AIMHealth”, which is gratefully acknowledged.

In this paper, some collision avoidance systems based on MEC in a VANET environment are proposed and investigated. Micro services at edge are considered to support service continuity in vehicle communication and advertising. This considered system makes use of cloud and edge computing, allowing to switch communication from edge to cloud server and vice versa when possible, trying to guarantee the required constraints and balancing the communication among the servers. Simulation results were used to evaluate the performance of three considered mechanisms: the first one considering only edge with load balancing, the second one using edge/cloud switching and the third one using edge with load balancing and collision avoidance advertising.

The Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare has gained significant attention in recent years. This study demonstrates an adaptation of IoT in healthcare by illustrating a method of respiration rate measurement from a platform that simulates breathing. Respiration rate is a crucial physiological measure in monitoring critically ill patients. The devised approach, with further development, may be suitable for integration into neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) to measure infants’ respiration rate. A potential advantage of this method is that it monitors respiration using a wireless non-contact method and could add benefits such as preservation of skin integrity. The paper aimed to assess the accuracy of an IoT-integrated ultrasound (US)-based method for measuring respiration rate. Chest movement due to respiration was simulated by a platform with a controllable moving surface. The magnitude and frequency of the movements were accurately controlled by a signal generator. The surface movements were tracked using US as a reliable and cost-effective technology. ESP8266 NodeMCU was used to wirelessly record the US signal and ThingSpeak and Matlab© were used to analyze and visualize the data in the cloud. A close relationship between the measured rate of the simulated respiration and the actual frequency was observed. The study demonstrated a possible adaption of IoT for respiration rate measurement, however further work will be needed to ensure security and reliability of data handling before use of the system in medical environments.

The increasing availability of mobile devices and applications, the progress in virtualisation technologies, and advances in the development of cloud-based distributed data centres have significantly stimulated the growing interest in the use of software-defined networks (SDNs) for both wired and wireless applications. Standards-based software abstraction between the network control plane and the underlying data forwarding plane, including both physical and virtual devices, provides an opportunity to significantly increase network security. In this paper, to secure SDNs against intruders’ actions, we propose a comprehensive system that exploits the advantages of SDNs’ native features and implements data mining to detect and classify malicious flows in the SDN data plane. The architecture of the system and its mechanisms are described, with an emphasis on flow rule generation and flow classification. The concept was verified in the SDN testbed environment that reflects typical SDN flows. The experiments confirmed that the system can be successfully implemented in SDNs to mitigate threats caused by different malicious activities of intruders. The results show that our combination of data mining techniques provides better detection and classification of malicious flows than other solutions.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications enable real-time information exchange between vehicles and infrastructure, which extends the perception range of vehicles beyond the limits of on-board sensors and, thus, facilitating the realisation of cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) services that will improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In the context of CCAM, the successful deployments of cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) use cases, with the integration of advanced wireless communication technologies, are effectively leading to make transport safer and more efficient. However, the evaluation of multi-vendor and multi-protocol based CCAM service architectures can become challenging and complex. Additionally, conducting on-demand field trials of such architectures with real vehicles involved is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In order to overcome these obstacles, in this paper, we present the development of a standards-compliant experimental vehicular on-board unit (OBU) that supports the integration of multiple V2X protocols from different vendors to communicate with heterogeneous cloud-based services that are offered by several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We experimentally demonstrate the functionalities of the OBU in a real-world deployment of a cooperative collision avoidance service infrastructure that is based on edge and cloud servers. In addition, we measure end-to-end application-level latencies of multi-protocol supported V2X information flows to show the effectiveness of interoperability in V2X communications between different vehicle OEMs.

This paper reviews the recent developments of design optimization methods for electromagnetic devices, with a focus on machine learning methods. First, the recent advances in multi-objective, multidisciplinary, multilevel, topology, fuzzy, and robust design optimization of electromagnetic devices are overviewed. Second, a review is presented to the performance prediction and design optimization of electromagnetic devices based on the machine learning algorithms, including artificial neural network, support vector machine, extreme learning machine, random forest, and deep learning. Last, to meet modern requirements of high manufacturing/production quality and lifetime reliability, several promising topics, including the application of cloud services and digital twin, are discussed as future directions for design optimization of electromagnetic devices.

Globally, breast cancer is one of the most significant causes of death among women. Early detection accompanied by prompt treatment can reduce the risk of death due to breast cancer. Currently, machine learning in cloud computing plays a pivotal role in disease diagnosis, but predominantly among the people living in remote areas where medical facilities are scarce. Diagnosis systems based on machine learning act as secondary readers and assist radiologists in the proper diagnosis of diseases, whereas cloud-based systems can support telehealth services and remote diagnostics. Techniques based on artificial neural networks (ANN) have attracted many researchers to explore their capability for disease diagnosis. Extreme learning machine (ELM) is one of the variants of ANN that has a huge potential for solving various classification problems. The framework proposed in this paper amalgamates three research domains: Firstly, ELM is applied for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Secondly, to eliminate insignificant features, the gain ratio feature selection method is employed. Lastly, a cloud computing-based system for remote diagnosis of breast cancer using ELM is proposed. The performance of the cloud-based ELM is compared with some state-of-the-art technologies for disease diagnosis. The results achieved on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WBCD) dataset indicate that the cloud-based ELM technique outperforms other results. The best performance results of ELM were found for both the standalone and cloud environments, which were compared. The important findings of the experimental results indicate that the accuracy achieved is 0.9868, the recall is 0.9130, the precision is 0.9054, and the F1-score is 0.8129.

Abdelaziz, A., Anastasiadou, M., & Castelli, M. (2020). A parallel particle swarm optimisation for selecting optimal virtual machine on cloud environment. Applied Sciences (Switzerland), 10(18), 1-25. [2806]. https://doi.org/10.3390/APP10186538 Cloud computing has a significant role in healthcare services, especially in medical applications. In cloud computing, the best choice of virtual machines (Virtual_Ms) has an essential role in the quality improvement of cloud computing by minimising the execution time of medical queries from stakeholders and maximising utilisation of medicinal resources. Besides, the best choice of Virtual_Ms assists the stakeholders to reduce the total execution time of medical requests through turnaround time and maximise CPU utilisation and waiting time. For that, this paper introduces an optimisation model for medical applications using two distinct intelligent algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA) and parallel particle swarm optimisation (PPSO). In addition, a set of experiments was conducted to provide a competitive study between those two algorithms regarding the execution time, the data processing speed, and the system efficiency. The PPSO algorithm was implemented using the MATLAB tool. The results showed that the PPSO algorithm gives accurate outcomes better than the GA in terms of the execution time of medical queries and efficiency by 3.02% and 37.7%, respectively. Also, the PPSO algorithm has been implemented on the CloudSim package. The results displayed that the PPSO algorithm gives accurate outcomes better than default CloudSim in terms of final implementation time of medicinal queries by 33.3%. Finally, the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in the literature review by a range from 13% to 67%. publishersversion published

Many cloud providers offer IoT services that simplify the collection and processing of IoT information. However, the IoT infrastructure composed of sensors and actuators that produces this information remains outside the cloud, therefore, application developers must install, connect and manage the cloud. This requirement can be a market barrier, especially for small/medium software companies that cannot afford the infrastructural costs associated with it and would only prefer to focus on IoT application developments. Motivated by the wish to eliminate this barrier, this paper proposes a Cloud of Things platform, called VirIoT, which fully brings the Infrastructure as a service model typical of cloud computing to the world of Internet of Things. VirIoT provides users with virtual IoT infrastructures (Virtual Silos) composed of virtual things, with which users can interact through dedicated and standardized broker servers in which the technology can be chosen among those offered by the platform, such as oneM2M, NGSI and NGSI-LD. VirIoT allows developers to focus their efforts exclusively on IoT applications without worrying about infrastructure management and allows cloud providers to expand their IoT services portfolio. VirIoT uses external things and cloud/edge computing resources to deliver the IoT virtualization services. Its open-source architecture is microservice-based and runs on top of a distributed Kubernetes platform with nodes in central and edge data centers. The architecture is scalable, efficient and able to support the continuous integration of heterogeneous things and IoT standards, taking care of interoperability issues. Using a VirIoT deployment spanning data centers in Europe and Japan, we conducted a performance evaluation with a two-fold objective: showing the efficiency and scalability of the architecture, and leveraging VirIoT’s ability to integrate different IoT standards in order to make a fair comparison of some open-source IoT Broker implementations, namely Mobius for oneM2M, Orion for NGSIv2, Orion-LD and Scorpio for NGSI-LD.

The number of patients with cardiovascular diseases is rapidly increasing in the world. The workload of existing clinicians is consequently increasing. However, the number of cardiovascular clinicians is declining. In this paper, we aim to design a mobile and automatic system to improve the abilities of patients&rsquo, cardiovascular health management while also reducing clinicians&rsquo, workload. Our system includes both hardware and cloud software devices based on recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. A small hardware device was designed to collect high-quality Electrocardiogram (ECG) data from the human body. A novel deep-learning-based cloud service was developed and deployed to achieve automatic and accurate cardiovascular disease detection. Twenty types of diagnostic items including sinus rhythm, tachyarrhythmia, and bradyarrhythmia are supported. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our system. Our hardware device can guarantee high-quality ECG data by removing high-/low-frequency distortion and reverse lead detection with 0.9011 Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC&ndash, AUC) score. Our deep-learning-based cloud service supports 20 types of diagnostic items, 17 of them have more than 0.98 ROC&ndash, AUC score. For a real world application, the system has been used by around 20,000 users in twenty provinces throughout China. As a consequence, using this service, we could achieve both active and passive health management through a lightweight mobile application on the WeChat Mini Program platform. We believe that it can have a broader impact on cardiovascular health management in the world.

The technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) have an increasing influence on our daily lives. The expansion of the IoT is associated with the growing number of IoT devices that are connected to the Internet. As the number of connected devices grows, the demand for speed and data volume is also greater. While most IoT network technologies use cloud computing, this solution becomes inefficient for some use-cases. For example, suppose that a company that uses an IoT network with several sensors to collect data within a production hall. The company may require sharing only selected data to the public cloud and responding faster to specific events. In the case of a large amount of data, the off-loading techniques can be utilized to reach higher efficiency. Meeting these requirements is difficult or impossible for solutions adopting cloud computing. The fog computing paradigm addresses these cases by providing data processing closer to end devices. This paper proposes three possible network architectures that adopt fog computing for LoRaWAN because LoRaWAN is already deployed in many locations and offers long-distance communication with low-power consumption. The architecture proposals are further compared in simulations to select the optimal form in terms of total service time. The resulting optimal communication architecture could be deployed to the existing LoRaWAN with minimal cost and effort of the network operator. Web of Science 21 9 art. no. 3159

Chronic diseases are becoming more widespread. Treatment and monitoring of these diseases require going to hospitals frequently, which increases the burdens of hospitals and patients. Presently, advancements in wearable sensors and communication protocol contribute to enriching the healthcare system in a way that will reshape healthcare services shortly. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is the foremost of these advancements. RPM systems are based on the collection of patient vital signs extracted using invasive and noninvasive techniques, then sending them in real-time to physicians. These data may help physicians in taking the right decision at the right time. The main objective of this paper is to outline research directions on remote patient monitoring, explain the role of AI in building RPM systems, make an overview of the state of the art of RPM, its advantages, its challenges, and its probable future directions. For studying the literature, five databases have been chosen (i.e., science direct, IEEE-Explore, Springer, PubMed, and science.gov). We followed the (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) PRISMA, which is a standard methodology for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. A total of 56 articles are reviewed based on the combination of a set of selected search terms including RPM, data mining, clinical decision support system, electronic health record, cloud computing, internet of things, and wireless body area network. The result of this study approved the effectiveness of RPM in improving healthcare delivery, increase diagnosis speed, and reduce costs. To this end, we also present the chronic disease monitoring system as a case study to provide enhanced solutions for RPMs This research work was partially supported by the Sejong University Research Faculty Program (20212023) SI

Privacy protection in electronic healthcare applications is an important consideration, due to the sensitive nature of personal health data. Internet of Health Things (IoHT) networks that are used within a healthcare setting have unique challenges and security requirements (integrity, authentication, privacy, and availability) that must also be balanced with the need to maintain efficiency in order to conserve battery power, which can be a significant limitation in IoHT devices and networks. Data are usually transferred without undergoing filtering or optimization, and this traffic can overload sensors and cause rapid battery consumption when interacting with IoHT networks. This poses certain restrictions on the practical implementation of these devices. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving two-tier data inference framework solution that conserves battery consumption by inferring the sensed data and reducing data size for transmission, while also protecting sensitive data from leakage to adversaries. The results from experimental evaluations on efficiency and privacy show the validity of the proposed scheme, as well as significant data savings without compromising data transmission accuracy, which contributes to energy efficiency of IoHT sensor devices.

Today, many products and solutions are provided on the cloud, however, the amount and financial losses due to cloud security incidents illustrate the critical need to do more to protect cloud assets adequately. A gap lies in transferring what cloud and security standards recommend and require to industry practitioners working in the front line. It is of paramount importance to raise awareness about cloud security of these industrial practitioners. Under the guidance of design science paradigm, we introduce a serious game to help participants understand the inherent risks, understand the different roles, and encourage proactive defensive thinking in defending cloud assets. In our game, we designed and implemented an automated evaluator as a novel element. We invite the players to build defense plans and attack plans for which the evaluator calculates success likelihoods. The primary target group is industry practitioners, whereas people with limited background knowledge about cloud security can also participate in and benefit from the game. We design the game and organize several trial runs in an industrial setting. Observations of the trial runs and collected feedback indicate that the game ideas and logic are useful and provide help in raising awareness of cloud security in industry. Our preliminary results share insight into the design of the serious game and are discussed in this paper.

Cloud computing as a technology has the capacity to enhance cooperation, scalability, accessibility, and offers discount prospects using improved and effective computing, and this capability helps organizations to stay focused. Ontologies are used to model knowledge. Once knowledge is modeled, knowledge management systems can be used to search, match, visualize knowledge, and also infer new knowledge. Ontologies use semantic analysis to define information within an environment with interconnecting relationships between heterogeneous sets. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature on ontology in cloud computing and defines the state of the art. We applied the systematic literature review (SLR) approach and identified 400 articles; 58 of the articles were selected after further selection based on set selection criteria, and 35 articles were considered relevant to the study. The study shows that four predominant areas of cloud computing—cloud security, cloud interoperability, cloud resources and service description, and cloud services discovery and selection—have attracted the attention of researchers as dominant areas where cloud ontologies have made great impact. The proposed methods in the literature applied 30 ontologies in the cloud domain, and five of the methods are still practiced in the legacy computing environment. From the analysis, it was found that several challenges exist, including those related to the application of ontologies to enhance business operations in the cloud and multi-cloud. Based on this review, the study summarizes some unresolved challenges and possible future directions for cloud ontology researchers.

A smart city represents an improvement of today’s cities, both functionally and structurally, that strategically utilizes several smart factors, capitalizing on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase the city’s sustainable growth and strengthen the city’s functions, while ensuring the citizens’ enhanced quality of life and health. Cities can be viewed as a microcosm of interconnected “objects” with which citizens interact daily, which represents an extremely interesting example of a cyber physical system (CPS), where the continuous monitoring of a city’s status occurs through sensors and processors applied within the real-world infrastructure. Each object in a city can be both the collector and distributor of information regarding mobility, energy consumption, air pollution as well as potentially offering cultural and tourist information. As a consequence, the cyber and real worlds are strongly linked and interdependent in a smart city. New services can be deployed when needed, and evaluation mechanisms can be set up to assess the health and success of a smart city. In particular, the objectives of creating ICT-enabled smart city environments target (but are not limited to) improved city services, optimized decision-making, the creation of smart urban infrastructures, the orchestration of cyber and physical resources, addressing challenging urban issues, such as environmental pollution, transportation management, energy usage and public health, the optimization of the use and benefits of next generation (5G and beyond) communication, the capitalization of social networks and their analysis, support for tactile internet applications, and the inspiration of urban citizens to improve their quality of life. However, the large scale deployment of cyber-physical-social systems faces a series of challenges and issues (e.g., energy efficiency requirements, architecture, protocol stack design, implementation, and security), which requires more smart sensing and computing methods as well as advanced networking and communications technologies to provide more pervasive cyber-physical-social services. In this paper, we discuss the challenges, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions to a set of currently unresolved key questions related to CPSs and smart cities.

The shift towards microservisation which can be observed in recent developments of the cloud landscape for applications has led towards the emergence of the Function as a Service (FaaS) concept, also called Serverless. This term describes the event-driven, reactive programming paradigm of functional components in container instances, which are scaled, deployed, executed and billed by the cloud provider on demand. However, increasing reports of issues of Serverless services have shown significant obscurity regarding its reliability. In particular, developers and especially system administrators struggle with latency compliance. In this paper, following a systematic literature review, the performance indicators influencing traffic and the effective delivery of the provider&rsquo, s underlying infrastructure are determined by carrying out empirical measurements based on the example of a File Upload Stream on Amazon&rsquo, s Web Service Cloud. This popular example was used as an experimental baseline in this study, based on different incoming request rates. Different parameters were used to monitor and evaluate changes through the function&rsquo, s logs. It has been found that the so-called Cold-Start, meaning the time to provide a new instance, can increase the Round-Trip-Time by 15%, on average. Cold-Start happens after an instance has not been called for around 15 min, or after around 2 h have passed, which marks the end of the instance&rsquo, s lifetime. The research shows how the numbers have changed in comparison to earlier related work, as Serverless is a fast-growing field of development. Furthermore, emphasis is given towards future research to improve the technology, algorithms, and support for developers.

Forecasting stock prices plays an important role in setting a trading strategy or determining the appropriate timing for buying or selling a stock. The use of technical analysis for financial forecasting has been successfully employed by many researchers. The existing qualitative based methods developed based on fuzzy reasoning techniques cannot describe the data comprehensively, which has greatly limited the objectivity of fuzzy time series in uncertain data forecasting. Extended fuzzy sets (e.g., fuzzy probabilistic set) study the fuzziness of the membership grade to a concept. The cloud model, based on probability measure space, automatically produces random membership grades of a concept through a cloud generator. In this paper, a cloud model-based approach was proposed to confirm accurate stock based on Japanese candlestick. By incorporating probability statistics and fuzzy set theories, the cloud model can aid the required transformation between the qualitative concepts and quantitative data. The degree of certainty associated with candlestick patterns can be calculated through repeated assessments by employing the normal cloud model. The hybrid weighting method comprising the fuzzy time series, and Heikin&ndash, Ashi candlestick was employed for determining the weights of the indicators in the multi-criteria decision-making process. Fuzzy membership functions are constructed by the cloud model to deal effectively with uncertainty and vagueness of the stock historical data with the aim to predict the next open, high, low, and close prices for the stock. The experimental results prove the feasibility and high forecasting accuracy of the proposed model.

Deep learning is now present in a wide range of services and applications, replacing and complementing other machine learning algorithms. Performing training and inference of deep neural networks using the cloud computing model is not viable for applications where low latency is required. Furthermore, the rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things will generate a large volume of data to be processed, which will soon overload the capacity of cloud servers. One solution is to process the data at the edge devices themselves, in order to alleviate cloud server workloads and improve latency. However, edge devices are less powerful than cloud servers, and many are subject to energy constraints. Hence, new resource and energy-oriented deep learning models are required, as well as new computing platforms. This paper reviews the main research directions for edge computing deep learning algorithms.

The interoperations of endpoint devices are generally achieved by gateways in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, the gateways mainly focus on networking communication, which is lack of data logic control capabilities. The microcontrollers with embedded intelligence could work as an intermediate device to help the interconnections of the endpoint devices. Moreover, they could help control the endpoint devices. In this paper, a microcontroller architecture with intelligent and scalable characteristics is proposed. The intelligence means that the microcontroller could control the target endpoint devices by its logical circuits, and the scalability means that the microcontroller architecture could be easily extended to deal with more complex problems. Two real world industrial implementations of the proposed architecture are introduced. The implementations show that the microcontroller is important to provide the intelligent services to users in IoT systems. Furthermore, a simulation experiment based on the cloud model is designed to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.

In healthcare applications, numerous sensors and devices produce massive amounts of data which are the focus of critical tasks. Their management at the edge of the network can be done by Fog computing implementation. However, Fog Nodes suffer from lake of resources That could limit the time needed for final outcome/analytics. Fog Nodes could perform just a small number of tasks. A difficult decision concerns which tasks will perform locally by Fog Nodes. Each node should select such tasks carefully based on the current contextual information, for example, tasks&rsquo, priority, resource load, and resource availability. We suggest in this paper a Multi-Agent Fog Computing model for healthcare critical tasks management. The main role of the multi-agent system is mapping between three decision tables to optimize scheduling the critical tasks by assigning tasks with their priority, load in the network, and network resource availability. The first step is to decide whether a critical task can be processed locally, otherwise, the second step involves the sophisticated selection of the most suitable neighbor Fog Node to allocate it. If no Fog Node is capable of processing the task throughout the network, it is then sent to the Cloud facing the highest latency. We test the proposed scheme thoroughly, demonstrating its applicability and optimality at the edge of the network using iFogSim simulator and UTeM clinic data.

With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, a huge amount of latency-sensitive and computation-intensive IoT applications have been injected into the network. Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) servers in cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a promising candidate, which brings a number of critical IoT applications to the edge network, to reduce the heavy traffic load and the end-to-end latency. The MEC server&rsquo, s deployment mechanism is highly related to the user allocation. Therefore, in this paper, we study hierarchical deployment of MEC servers and user allocation problem. We first formulate the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to minimize the deployment cost and average latency. In terms of the MINLP model, we then propose an enumeration algorithm and approximate algorithm based on the improved entropy weight and TOPSIS methods. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can reduce the total cost, and the approximate algorithm has lower total cost comparing the heaviest-location first and the latency-based algorithms.

This article belongs to the Special Issue Time-Sensitive Networks for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been very effective in collecting aerial images data for various Internet-of-Things (IoT)/smart cities applications such as search and rescue, surveillance, vehicle detection, counting, intelligent transportation systems, to name a few. However, the real-time processing of collected data on edge in the context of the Internet-of-Drones remains an open challenge because UAVs have limited energy capabilities, while computer vision techniquesconsume excessive energy and require abundant resources. This fact is even more critical when deep learning algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are used for classification and detection. In this paper, we first propose a system architecture of computation offloading for Internet-connected drones. Then, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study to evaluate the performance in terms of energy, bandwidth, and delay of the cloud computation offloading approach versus the edge computing approach of deep learning applications in the context of UAVs. In particular, we investigate the tradeoff between the communication cost and the computation of the two candidate approaches experimentally. The main results demonstrate that the computation offloading approach allows us to provide much higher throughput (i.e., frames per second) as compared to the edge computing approach, despite the larger communication delays.

During the last decade, the Internet of Things acted as catalyst for the big data phenomenon. As result, modern edge devices can access a huge amount of data that can be exploited to build useful services. In such a context, artificial intelligence has a key role to develop intelligent systems (e.g., intelligent cyber physical systems) that create a connecting bridge with the physical world. However, as time goes by, machine and deep learning applications are becoming more complex, requiring increasing amounts of data and training time, which makes the use of centralized approaches unsuitable. Federated learning is an emerging paradigm which enables the cooperation of edge devices to learn a shared model (while keeping private their training data), thereby abating the training time. Although federated learning is a promising technique, its implementation is difficult and brings a lot of challenges. In this paper, we present an extension of Stack4Things, a cloud platform developed in our department, leveraging its functionalities, we enabled the deployment of federated learning on edge devices without caring their heterogeneity. Experimental results show a comparison with a centralized approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both training time and model accuracy.

Layered internet of things (IoT) architectures have been proposed over the last years as they facilitate understanding the roles of different networking, hardware, and software components of smart applications. These are inherently distributed, spanning from devices installed in the field up to a cloud datacenter and further to a user smartphone, passing by intermediary stages at different levels of fog computing infrastructure. However, IoT architectures provide almost no hints on where components should be deployed. IoT Software Platforms derived from the layered architectures are expected to adapt to scenarios with different characteristics, requirements, and constraints from stakeholders and applications. In such a complex environment, a one-size-fits-all approach does not adapt well to varying demands and may hinder the adoption of IoT Smart Applications. In this paper, we propose a 5-layer IoT Architecture and a 5-stage IoT Computing Continuum, as well as provide insights on the mapping of software components of the former into physical locations of the latter. Also, we conduct a performance analysis study with six configurations where components are deployed into different stages. Our results show that different deployment configurations of layered components into staged locations generate bottlenecks that affect system performance and scalability. Based on that, policies for static deployment and dynamic migration of layered components into staged locations can be identified.

Nowadays, mobile robot exploration needs a rangefinder to obtain a large number of measurement points to achieve a detailed and precise description of a surrounding area and objects, which is called the point cloud. However, a single point cloud scan does not cover the whole area, so multiple point cloud scans must be acquired and compared together to find the right matching between them in a process called registration method. This method requires further processing and places high demands on memory consumption, especially for small embedded devices in mobile robots. This paper describes a novel method to reduce the burden of processing for multiple point cloud scans. We introduce our approach to preprocess an input point cloud in order to detect planar surfaces, simplify space description, fill gaps in point clouds, and get important space features. All of these processes are achieved by applying advanced image processing methods in combination with the quantization of physical space points. The results show the reliability of our approach to detect close parallel walls with suitable parameter settings. More importantly, planar surface detection shows a 99% decrease in necessary descriptive points almost in all cases. This proposed approach is verified on the real indoor point clouds. Web of Science 10 10 art. no. 3340

[EN] Object recognition, which can be used in processes such as reconstruction of the environment map or the intelligent navigation of vehicles, is a necessary task in smart city environments. In this paper, we propose an architecture that integrates heterogeneously distributed information to recognize objects in intelligent environments. The architecture is based on the IoT/Industry 4.0 model to interconnect the devices, which are called smart resources. Smart resources can process local sensor data and offer information to other devices as a service. These other devices can be located in the same operating range (the edge), in the same intranet (the fog), or on the Internet (the cloud). Smart resources must have an intelligent layer in order to be able to process the information. A system with two smart resources equipped with different image sensors is implemented to validate the architecture. Our experiments show that the integration of information increases the certainty in the recognition of objects by 2-4%. Consequently, in intelligent environments, it seems appropriate to provide the devices with not only intelligence, but also capabilities to collaborate closely with other devices., This research was funded by the Spanish Science and Innovation Ministry grant number MICINN: CICYT project PRECON-I4: "Predictable and dependable computer systems for Industry 4.0" TIN2017-86520-C3-1-R.

The extreme bandwidth and performance of 5G mobile networks changes the way we develop and utilize digital services. Within a few years, 5G will not only touch technology and applications, but dramatically change the economy, our society and individual life. One of the emerging technologies that enables the evolution to 5G by bringing cloud capabilities near to the end users is Edge Computing or also known as Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) that will become pertinent towards the evolution of 5G. This evolution also entails growth in the threat landscape and increase privacy in concerns at different application areas, hence security and privacy plays a central role in the evolution towards 5G. Since MEC application instantiated in the virtualized infrastructure, in this paper we present a distributed application that aims to constantly introspect multiple virtual machines (VMs) in order to detect malicious activities based on their anomalous behavior. Once suspicious processes detected, our IDS in real-time notifies system administrator about the potential threat. Developed software is able to detect keyloggers, rootkits, trojans, process hiding and other intrusion artifacts via agent-less operation, by operating remotely or directly from the host machine. Remote memory introspection means no software to install, no notice to malware to evacuate or destroy data. Experimental results of remote VMI on more than 50 different malicious code demonstrate average anomaly detection rate close to 97%. We have established wide testbed environment connecting networks of two universities Kyushu Institute of Technology and The City College of New York through secure GRE tunnel. Conducted experiments on this testbed deliver high response time of the proposed system.