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In the aftermath of unparalleled disruptive technologies, the quantum realm has become a fundamental field of research due to unrivaled computational power and super-secure communication. In addition to conventional networks, a new word in the quantum domain is quantum network. The quantum network uses quantum communication (QC) to send quantum information bits known as qubits, to predetermined destination nodes. It governs the new quantum mechanics notions like superposition, quantum entanglement, the no-cloning theorem, and quantum teleportation. Quantum communication, like classical communication, is prone to noise, which is known as quantum decoherence. Quantum decoherence is a significant barrier to the implementation of a global quantum network. It deteriorates the quantum information, causing it to lie in an undetermined state. Environmental factors that cause quantum entanglement loss are the key factors that cause qubits to lose their states. To mitigate the impact of quantum decoherence, quantum error correction codes (QECC) and entanglement distillation have proved their potential. They add extra qubits or maintain entanglements among quantum networks. This survey presents quantum mechanics principles, quantum decoherence, and techniques to mitigate the effect of quantum decoherence. At the end, we highlighted some challenges in the realization of the quantum network, along with some projected applications.

With growing urbanization, water contamination has become a problem. The water quality is assessed using physicochemical parameters and requires manual collection. Moreover, physicochemical parameters are insufficient for water quality monitoring as heavy rainfalls and abundance of air pollutants cause water pollution. Thus, considering natural factors as influencing parameters and the latest technology for easy and global coverage for sampling, water quality monitoring is modified. This study investigates Rawal watershed with (a) physicochemical, (b) air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and (c) meteorological variables like wind speed for June 2018 to September 2022. Correlation and regression analysis are performed. The results show negative correlations for NO2 with total dissolved solids (TDS) (ranging, 0.51–0.85), turbidity (range, 0.53–0.65), pH (range, 0.5–0.75), and dissolved oxygen (DO) (range, 0.5–0.82), and positive correlation with electric conductivity (EC) (range, 0.54–0.85). The regression analysis with LightGBM, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and support vector machine (SVM) is applied with air pollutants, and meteorological parameters taken as independent variables giving root-mean-square error (RMSE) (ranging, 0.015–0.18). MLP gave an RMSE of 0.18 and 0.003 for TDS and pH, respectively. SVM performed well for DO, turbidity, and EC with RMSE ranging from 0.015 to 0.027. Moreover, floods on August 2022 are taken as a case study. HIGHLIGHTS Impact assessment of air pollutants on physicochemical parameters.; Meteorological features can have a moderate impact on water quality, i.e., wind speed with chl-α, EC, DO, and TDS, and air temperature with DO and TDS in August and September.; Machine learning approaches, i.e., LightGBM, MLP, and SVM, are applied for the analysis.; Floods can have a negative impact on water quality introducing an excess of pollutants and nutrients in water.;

Wheat is the most important and dominating crop in Pakistan in terms of production and acreage, which is grown on 37% of the cultivated area, accounting for 70% of the total production. However, wheat yield is highly affected by stripe rust, which is considered the most devastating fungal disease, causing 5.5 million tonnes of loss per year globally. In order to minimize this loss, the accurate and timely detection of rust disease is crucial instead of manual inspection. Towards this end, we propose a system to detect wheat rust disease and classify its infection types into four classes, including healthy, resistant, moderate (moderately resistant to moderately susceptible), and susceptible. The wheat rust dataset is collected indigenously from the National Agricultural Research Centre, Islamabad. A pre-trained U2 Net model is used to remove the background and extract the leaf containing the rust disease. Subsequently, two deep learning classifiers, including the Xception model and ResNet-50 are applied to classify the stripe rust severity levels, where the ResNet-50 model outperformed with the highest accuracy of 96%. This research presents a comparison between two state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers in terms of accuracy, memory utilization, and prediction time, which will assist the research community in selecting the most appropriate model for plant disease detection. Moreover, to assess the external validity, the performance of these classifiers is compared with the existing technique using a publicly available dataset, which confirms the validity of the results. Additionally, an intelligent edge computing rust detection device has been developed, where the trained ResNet-50 model is deployed, which facilitates the farmers to monitor the rust attack. The proposed research is aimed to assist the agricultural community to employ preventive measures in a site-specific manner based on the accurate diagnosis of rust disease & its severity, which is intended to improve the quality of the wheat as well as production.

Water Quality Index (WQI) is a unique and effective rating technique for assessing the quality of water. Nevertheless, most of the indices are not applicable to all water types as these are dependent on core physico-chemical water parameters that can make them biased and sensitive towards specific attributes including: (i) time, location and frequency for data sampling; (ii) number, variety and weights allocation of parameters. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate these indices to eliminate uncertainties that make them unpredictable and which may lead to manipulation of the water quality classes. The present study calculated five WQIs for two temporal periods: (i) June to December 2019 obtained in real time (using the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes) at inlet and outlet streams of Rawal Dam; (ii) 2012–2019 obtained from the Rawal Dam Water Filtration Plant, collected through GIS-based grab sampling. The computed WQIs categorized the collected datasets as ‘Very Poor’, primarily owing to the uneven distribution of the water samples that has led to class imbalance in the data. Additionally, this study investigates the classification of water quality using machine learning algorithms namely: Decision Tree (DT), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Logistic Regression (LogR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Naive Bayes (NB); based on the parameters including: pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, turbidity, fecal coliform and temperature. The classification results showed that the DT algorithm outperformed other models with a classification accuracy of 99%. Although WQI is a popular method used to assess the water quality, there is a need to address the uncertainties and biases introduced by the limitations of data acquisition (such as specific location/area, type and number of parameters or water type) leading to class imbalance. This can be achieved by developing a more refined index that considers various other factors such as topographical and hydrological parameters with spatial temporal variations combined machine learning techniques to effectively contribute in estimation of water quality for all regions. HIGHLIGHTS Evaluated five WQI based on six physico-chemical parameters to analyze their sensitivity toward selected location, type and frequency for data sampling.; Computed WQIs categorized the dataset as ‘Very Poor’ because of the uneven distribution of water samples leading to class imbalance.; Five ML models used in which Decision Tree classification accuracy is 99%.; For refined index topographical and hydrological parameters should be considered.;

Wheat is a staple crop that is grown across the world due to its substantial contribution to human nutrition. Its significance is evident as it provides almost 20% of calories and protein required for daily human consumption. However, wheat yield is affected by rust disease that can reduce 30% of wheat production which is a serious threat to food security. In order to minimize the loss, it is crucial to identify precisely and localize the wheat rust disease and its infection types. For this purpose, several classification and segmentation techniques are used which are based on machine/deep learning models. This paper provides a realistic analysis and evaluation of various segmentation techniques including Watershed, Grab Cut, and U2-Net. These techniques are applied to the wheat stripe rust data to generate multiple datasets such as Watershed segmented data, GrabCut segmented data, and U2-Net segmented data. Subsequently, a pre-trained deep learning model, ResNet-18 is applied to these datasets to assess the impact of segmentation on classification accuracy. The highest classification accuracy (96.196%) is achieved on the dataset segmented by U2-Net. This research collates several state-of-the-art segmentation techniques in terms of correctness and their direct impact on classification accuracy which gives a pragmatic analysis for researchers to choose optimal segmentation technique. The research primarily focuses on the direct impact of segmentation on classification accuracy of wheat stripe rust, which has not been given sufficient focus in earlier researches.

The goal of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and digital healthcare systems is to provide people with the ease of receiving quality healthcare at the comfort of their homes. Hence, the aim of IoMT is the ubiquitous deployment of home-based healthcare systems. Making such systems intelligent and efficient for timely prediction of critical diseases can save millions of lives while simultaneously reducing the burden on the traditional healthcare systems e.g., hospitals. The advancement in IoT has enabled both patients and doctors to access real time data. This advancement has reduced the cost and energy consumption of digital healthcare systems by using efficient sensors and communication technologies. This paper provides a comprehensive review of various studies conducted for the development and improvement of IoMT. It analyses different sensors used for measurement of various parameters ranging from physiological to emotional signals. It also provides a detailed investigation of different communication technologies being used, their advantages, and limitations. Moreover, digital healthcare systems are now deploying machine learning technology for the prediction of health status of patients. These techniques and algorithms are also discussed. Data security and prediction accuracy are the main concerns in the development of this area. In conclusion, this paper reviews the various digital system designs in the context of healthcare, their methodology, limitations, and the present challenges faced by the e-health sector.

The agriculture sector holds paramount importance in Pakistan due to the intrinsic agrarian nature of the economy. Pakistan has its GDP based on agriculture, however it relies on manual monitoring of crops, which is a labour intensive and ineffective method. In contrast to this, several cutting edge technology-based solutions are being employed in the developed countries to enhance the crop yield with the optimal use of resources. To this end, we have proposed an integrated approach for monitoring crop health using IoT, machine learning and drone technology. The integration of these sensing modalities generate heterogeneous data which not only varies in nature (i.e. observed parameter) but also has different temporal fidelity. The spatial resolution of these methods is also different, hence, the optimal integration of these sensing modalities and their implementation in practice are addressed in the proposed system. In our proposed solution, the IoT sensors provide the real-time status of environmental parameters impacting the crop, and the drone platform provide the multispectral data used for generating Vegetation Indices (VIs) such as Normalized Difference vegetation Index (NDVI) for analyzing the crop health. The NDVI provides information about the crop based on the chlorophyll content, which offers limited information regarding the crop health. In order to obtain a rich and detailed knowledge about crop health, the variable length time series data of IoT sensors and multispectral images were converted to a fixed-sized representation to generate crop health maps. A number of machine and deep learning algorithms were applied on the collected data wherein deep neural network with two hidden layers was found to be the most optimal model among all the selected models, providing an accuracy of (98.4%). Further, the health maps were validated through ground surveys and by agriculture experts due to the absence of reference data. The proposed research is basically an indigenous, technology based agriculture solution capable of providing important insights into the crop health by extracting complementary features from multi-modal data set, and minimizing the crop ground survey effort, particularly useful when the agriculture land is large in size.

Crop classification in early phenological stages has been a difficult task due to spectrum similarity of different crops. For this purpose, low altitude platforms such as drones have great potential to provide high resolution optical imagery where Machine Learning (ML) applied to classify different types of crops. In this research work, crop classification is performed at different phenological stages using optical images which are obtained from drone. For this purpose, gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) based features are extracted from underlying gray scale images collected by the drone. To classify the different types of crops, different ML algorithms including Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are applied. The results showed that the ML algorithms performed much better on GLCM features as compared to gray scale images with a margin of 13.65% in overall accuracy.

Healthcare is an indispensable part of human life and chronic illnesses like cardiovascular diseases (CVD) have a deeply negative impact on the healthcare sector. Since the ever-growing population of chronic patients cannot be managed at hospitals, therefore, there is an urgent need for periodic monitoring of vital parameters and apposite treatment of these patients. In this paper, an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) -based remote patient monitoring system is proposed which is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and edge computing. The primary focus of this paper is to develop an embedded prototype that can be used for remote monitoring of cardiovascular patients. The system will continuously monitor physiological parameters like body temperature, heart rate, and blood oxygen saturation, and then report the health status to the authenticated users. The system employs edge computing to perform multiple functionalities including health status inference using a Machine Learning (ML) model which makes predictions on real-time data, alert notifications in case of an emergency, and transferring data between the sensor network and the cloud. A web-based application is developed for the depiction of raw data and ML results and to provide a direct communication channel between the patient and the doctor. The ML module achieved an accuracy of 96.26% on the test set using the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNNs) algorithm. This solution aims to address the sense of emergency due to the alarming statistics that highlight the mortality rate of cardiovascular patients. The project will enable a smart option based on IoT and ML to improve standards of living and prove crucial in saving human lives.

Continuous phase modulation (CPM) is a power and bandwidth efficient modulation scheme used in cellular, personal, and satellite communications among other applications. If the modulation index of the CPM waveform used by the transmitter is unavailable at the receiver, serious performance degradation may occur. This paper investigates the problem of modulation index estimation for partial response continuous phase modulation schemes. Specifically, we propose two novel estimators for the CPM signal observed in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. A non-data aided method of moments (MoM) estimator based upon the fourth-order cumulants and a data-aided best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) based upon an approximate linear phase model of the received CPM signal have been proposed. Modified Cramer-Rao lower bound is derived for the partial response CPM schemes to assess the performance of the estimators. We also perform numerical simulations to compare the mean-squared error (MSE) performance of the proposed MoM and BLUE estimators with previously proposed estimators in the literature. It is shown that the MoM estimator exhibits good MSE performance at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) while the BLUE estimator performs very well at high SNRs. Moreover, the proposed estimators have lower complexity than existing methods and are based upon non-iterative algorithms.

Wheat is a staple crop of Pakistan that covers almost 40% of the cultivated land and contributes almost 3% in the overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Pakistan. However, due to increasing seasonal variation, it was observed that wheat is majorly affected by rust disease, particularly in rain-fed areas. Rust is considered the most harmful fungal disease for wheat, which can cause reductions of 20–30% in wheat yield. Its capability to spread rapidly over time has made its management most challenging, becoming a major threat to food security. In order to counter this threat, precise detection of wheat rust and its infection types is important for minimizing yield losses. For this purpose, we have proposed a framework for classifying wheat yellow rust infection types using machine learning techniques. First, an image dataset of different yellow rust infections was collected using mobile cameras. Six Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) texture features and four Local Binary Patterns (LBP) texture features were extracted from grayscale images of the collected dataset. In order to classify wheat yellow rust disease into its three classes (healthy, resistant, and susceptible), Decision Tree, Random Forest, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and CatBoost were used with (i) GLCM, (ii) LBP, and (iii) combined GLCM-LBP texture features. The results indicate that CatBoost outperformed on GLCM texture features with an accuracy of 92.30%. This accuracy can be further improved by scaling up the dataset and applying deep learning models. The development of the proposed study could be useful for the agricultural community for the early detection of wheat yellow rust infection and assist in taking remedial measures to contain crop yield.

Wheat yellow rust is a common agricultural disease that affects the crop every year across the world. The disease not only negatively impacts the quality of the yield but the quantity as well, which results in adverse impact on economy and food supply. It is highly desired to develop methods for fast and accurate detection of yellow rust in wheat crop; however, high-resolution images are not always available which hinders the ability of trained models in detection tasks. The approach presented in this study harnesses the power of super-resolution generative adversarial networks (SRGAN) for upsampling the images before using them to train deep learning models for the detection of wheat yellow rust. After preprocessing the data for noise removal, SRGANs are used for upsampling the images to increase their resolution which helps convolutional neural network (CNN) in learning high-quality features during training. This study empirically shows that SRGANs can be used effectively to improve the quality of images and produce significantly better results when compared with models trained using low-resolution images. This is evident from the results obtained on upsampled images, i.e., 83% of overall test accuracy, which are substantially better than the overall test accuracy achieved for low-resolution images, i.e., 75%. The proposed approach can be used in other real-world scenarios where images are of low resolution due to the unavailability of high-resolution camera in edge devices.

The deployment of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) inevitably demands the design of interference management techniques to elevate the overall network performance. This paper presents a novel interference mitigation technique known as reverse frequency allocation (RFA), which provides an efficient resource allocation compared with the other state-of-the-art techniques. RFA reverses the transmission direction of interferers, thereby minimizing the cross-tier interference. Eventually, better coverage as well as increased data rates are achieved by providing complementary spectrum to the macro and pico users. In this paper, we present a tractable approach for modeling HetNets under the proposed RFA scheme. Specifically, we employ well known tools from stochastic geometry to derive closed-form expressions for the coverage probability and rate coverage in two-tier cellular network employing RFA and its variants. The modeling is performed using two approaches; first, where the base stations and users are modeled as independent Poisson point processes (PPPs) and second, the interference is approximated using the fluid model. It is shown that the results obtained from the PPP model are accurate for higher values of path loss exponents, while the results from fluid model are useful for smaller values of path loss exponents. The plausibility of model is validated through the Monte-Carlo simulations and the network performance is evaluated in terms of coverage probability, coverage rate, and outage capacity. The results demonstrate that 2-RFA yields outage capacity gains of 13% as compared with the soft fractional frequency reuse scheme, whereas, the performance gains can be further improved by 14% by employing the proposed variants of RFA.