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Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) generates substantial data through sensors for diverse applications, such as healthcare services. This article addresses the challenge of efficiently utilizing resources in resource-scarce IoT-enabled sensors to enhance data collection, transmission, and storage. Redundant data transmission from sensors covering overlapping areas incurs additional communication and storage costs. Existing schemes, namely Asymmetric Extremum (AE) and Rapid Asymmetric Maximum (RAM), employ fixed and variable-sized windows during chunking. However, these schemes face issues while selecting the index value to decide the variable window size, which may remain zero or very low, resulting in poor deduplication. This article resolves this issue in the proposed Controlled Cut-point Identification Algorithm (CCIA), designed to restrict the variable-sized window to a certain threshold. The index value for deciding the threshold will always be larger than the half size of the fixed window. It helps to find more duplicates, but the upper limit offset is also applied to avoid the unnecessarily large-sized window, which may cause extensive computation costs. The extensive simulations are performed by deploying Windows Communication Foundation services in the Azure cloud. The results demonstrate the superiority of CCIA in various metrics, including chunk number, average chunk size, minimum and maximum chunk number, variable chunking size, and probability of failure for cut point identification. In comparison to its competitors, RAM and AE, CCIA exhibits better performance across key parameters. Specifically, CCIA outperforms in total number of chunks (6.81%, 14.17%), average number of chunks (4.39%, 18.45%), and minimum chunk size (153%, 190%). These results highlight the effectiveness of CCIA in optimizing data transmission and storage within IoT systems, showcasing its potential for improved resource utilization and reduced operational costs.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized fields such as image classification, natural language processing (NLP), and object detection. Remote sensing is no exception, particularly synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image analysis, where it addresses the challenge of classifying inherently noisy and indistinct images. Traditionally, this task relied heavily on manual intervention, making it time-intensive. With automation becoming increasingly critical, research has shifted toward deep learning techniques. However, many existing approaches are computationally intensive and require substantial memory resources. In this study, we present a lightweight CNN specifically designed for SAR applications, tested on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset. Our model surpasses previous studies by demonstrating higher accuracy while utilizing significantly fewer parameters. This novel architecture achieves an optimal balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. This is particularly useful in a resource-constrained environment in many real-world applications. More specifically, our proposed CNN model demonstrates robust performance across various scenarios, achieving an accuracy of 99.7% in classifying the three target classes under standard operating conditions (SOCs). Furthermore, when extended to classify ten classes, our proposed model outperforms several baseline algorithms from state-of-the-art literature. This research attempts to achieve a trade-off between model performance and model size, contributing to the development of CNNs suitable for resource-limited applications, particularly targeting IoT deployments. The findings present a practical solution for situations that prioritize both accuracy and resource conservation, thereby advancing discussions on efficient model design.

Buildings constitute a significant portion of global energy demand, accounting for approximately 30% of final energy consumption and over 50% of global electricity usage. As per the International Energy Agency, this sector is responsible for 26% of energy-related emissions, with demand projected to increase by 4% in 2024, as per the International Energy Agency. Lighting is a critical component of this consumption and continues to be a major contributor to electricity use. A marked increase in residential lighting energy consumption in South Korea underscores these global trends. Traditional building energy models must address human behavior’s complexity, often relying on static schedules. This study leverages statistical and machine learning techniques to analyze lighting energy consumption across varying temporal scales, using real empirical data from South Korean residential buildings. The analysis reveals insights into behavior-driven energy consumption, highlighting the necessity for dynamic energy modeling that integrates occupant behavioral variability for energy use, their intrinsic routines, and temporal patterns. The findings have profound implications for enhancing energy efficiency and optimizing conservation strategies in escalating global energy demands.

Decentralized Edge Computing Networks (DECN) environments have emerged with the advent of the IoT to reduce delays, bringing data processing closer to where the data is generated to improve the processing of volumetric data at high speed instead of being sent to clouds to facilitate real-time applications. However, the security and privacy of the data exchanged among the edge devices need more consideration, considering its sensitivity and importance. Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) can be used to protect data exchange from malicious attacks. Unfortunately, CDH is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and lacks mutual authentication. Therefore, considering the computational power of devices in the DECN environment, this article presents a Modified CDH-based Secure and Lightweight Key Agreement Protocol (MCDH-SKLAP) to secure communication in the DECN. The proposed protocol has undergone a thorough analysis for robustness under ROM and ProVerif threat models, instilling confidence in its security aspects. Furthermore, the performance analysis results show it has low computation and communication overhead, making it suitable for use with resource-limited devices in the DECN environment. The proposed MCDH-SKLAP has achieved a 35% to 81% improvement in computation overhead and an 8.5% to 30% improvement in communication overhead.

Breast cancer, a widespread malignancy predominantly affecting women aged 40 and above, presents a significant global health challenge with high mortality rates. The scarcity of medical data underscores the need for collaborative efforts among hospitals to enhance automated breast cancer detection. This research employs decentralized Federated Learning (FL) to facilitate cooperative learning across an interconnected smart hospital network, addressing data privacy, regulatory compliance, voluminous medical image data, and the necessity for distributed machine learning. Our innovative approach integrates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for hyperparameter fine-tuning and Neural Architecture Search (NAS) in a collaborative framework for smart hospitals linked with decentralized edge intelligent networks. This optimization strategy significantly improves the performance of our breast cancer detection system. Through a comprehensive experimental study (including diverse datasets), we classify Normal vs. Mass and Benign vs. Malignant regions in mammograms within a decentralized, federated collaborative learning environment. Empirical results consistently highlight the superiority of models trained using our method over individual hospital client-level training. Our method yielded significant improvements across evaluation measures: for Normal vs. Mass, achieving 92.6% sensitivity, 93.0% specificity, and 93.0% accuracy; for Benign vs. Malignant, achieving 89.6% sensitivity, 91.6% specificity, and 89.7% accuracy. Moreover, it has obtained a 6% and 5% increase in accuracy for Normal vs. Mass and Benign vs. Malignant cases, respectively, compared to the PSO-based HPO method. This evidence underscores the potential of collaborative approaches, emphasizing decentralized FL as a robust paradigm in medical research. The incorporation of ACO optimization reinforces the effectiveness of the proposed computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system, marking a noteworthy advancement in the ongoing fight against breast cancer.

The integrated Electronic Control Unit (ECU) plays a pivotal role in optimizing energy efficiency within electric vehicles (EVs) by coordinating various subsystems, including the Vehicle Control Unit (VCU), Electrical Power Steering (EPS), Electronic Stability Control (ESC), and Body Control Unit (BCU). Our comprehensive review deeply explores the various aspects of integrated ECUs and their sub-disciplines, emphasizing development approaches and algorithms specifically designed for mobility energy efficiency. The study shows the effect of various control units on energy efficiency by carefully examining case studies and real-world applications. Employing a critical assessment, the paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of various control systems utilized in electric vehicles (EVs), providing insight into their effectiveness in various situations. The presented study is typically related to the relationship between ECUs and their sub-branches through an integrated approach. By comparing current control approaches, the study offers a deep knowledge of the role of these units in improving vehicle performance, stability, and overall control. Furthermore, we evaluate the strengths and limitations of integrated ECU algorithms in the context of EV control by comparing them in a fair amount of detail. We identify important research gaps by integrating knowledge of multiple control areas in EV. The research effort will give researchers a path forward and make it possible to pinpoint the prospective dimensions that need further exploration in advancing the area of integrated ECUs in EVs.

Abstract In the event of a fire breaking out or in other complicated situations, a mobile computing solution combining the Internet of Things and wearable devices can actually assist tracking solutions for rescuing and evacuating people in multistory structures. Thus, it is crucial to increase the positioning technology's accuracy. The sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approach is used in various applications such as target tracking and intelligent surveillance, which rely on smartphone‐based inertial data sequences. However, the SMC method has intrinsic flaws, such as sample impoverishment and particle degeneracy. A novel SMC approach is presented, which is built on the weighted differential evolution (WDE) algorithm. Sequential Monte Carlo approaches start with random particle placements and arrives at the desired distribution with a slower variance reduction, like in a high‐dimensional space, such as a multistory structure. Weighted differential evolution is included before the resampling procedure to guarantee the appropriate variety of the particle set, prevent the usage of an inadequate number of valid samples, and preserve smartphone user position accuracy. The values of the smartphone‐based sensors and BLE‐beacons are set as input to the SMC, which aids in fast approximating the posterior distributions, to speed up the particle congregation process in the proposed SMC‐based WDE approach. Lastly, the robustness and efficacy of the suggested technique more accurately reflect the actual situation of smartphone users. According to simulation findings, the suggested approach provides improved location estimation with reduced localization error and quick convergence. The results confirm that the proposed optimal fusion‐based SMC‐WDE scheme performs 9.92% better in terms of MAPE, 15.24% for the case of MAE, and 0.031% when evaluating based on the R2 Score.

The Internet of things has revolutionized various domains, such as healthcare and navigation systems, by introducing mission-critical capabilities. However, the untapped potential of IoT in the energy sector is a topic of contention. Shifting from traditional mission-critical electric smart grid systems to IoT-based orchestrated frameworks has become crucial to improve performance by leveraging IoT task orchestration technology. Energy trading cost and ESS power optimization have long been concerns in the scientific community. To address these issues, our proposed architecture consists of two primary modules: (1) a nanogrid energy trading cost and ESS power optimization strategy that utilizes particle swarm optimization (PSO), with two objective functions, and (2) an IoT-enabled task orchestration system designed for improved peer-to-peer nanogrid energy trading, incorporating virtual control through orchestration technology. We employ IoT sensors and Raspberry Pi-based Edge technology to virtually operate the entire nanogrid energy trading architecture, encompassing the aforementioned modules. IoT task orchestration automates the interaction between components for service execution, involving five main steps: task generation, device virtualization, task mapping, task scheduling, and task allocation and deployment. Evaluating the proposed model using a real dataset from nanogrid houses demonstrates the significant role of optimization in minimizing energy trading cost and optimizing ESS power utilization. Furthermore, the IoT orchestration results highlight the potential for virtual operation in significantly enhancing system performance.

The recent advancements in cyber technology have facilitated the global electronic sharing of healthcare data among various healthcare professionals, including clinicians, researchers, business administrators, and others. Fog computing is gaining popularity as a means of disseminating information across industries, especially in medicine and healthcare, due to its capability to manage vast amounts of information and data. The evolution of fog computing now allows it to be adaptable to various budget constraints within healthcare organizations, thanks to technological progress. This adaptation includes features like real-time data breach alerts and automated surveillance. As new communication and computing models emerge, fresh security and privacy concerns arise within medical and health-related data. Existing data privacy and security protocols have proven inadequate in preventing data leaks and theft attacks, especially those orchestrated by malicious parties. While medical data is stored in the cloud, legitimate entities’ authorized access to medical documents remains a significant concern. Therefore, this article designs an authentication and authorization scheme that safeguards the privacy of users’ medical information documents. In response to this challenge, we propose an innovative approach that leverages Decoy information technology and User Behavior profiling. This methodology aims to enhance the security of authorized data access within the Fog environment, ensuring the confidentiality of medical data. The results show that the proposed protocol is more secure against unauthorized access and security attacks and more computationally efficient than its counterparts.

Water drilling machines are used to drill boreholes in the ground to extract groundwater. The resources required for water drilling vary from region to region due to underground water table depth and ground soil layer. Water drilling on a hard underground soil layer requires different resources than a soft underground. The proposed study facilitates the drilling industry by selecting the region with a soft land layer and increasing the penetration rate. Furthermore, the number of days and water table depth prediction allows the drilling industry to estimate the depth of the water table and time resources to reach the water table at different locations. The classification techniques classify the region based on the soil land layer. Regression techniques are used for predicting water table depth and number of days. The experiments are performed on a borehole log dataset provided by a research organization. This study used Support Vector Machine, TabNet, and Deep Tabular models to predict the land soil layer and compare the results with our proposed Ensemble Weighted Voting Soil Layer Classifier (EWV-SLC). The performance of the classification model is evaluated using accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 Score. The experimental finding shows that the EWV-SLC model performs better in accuracy and F1 score than other machine learning techniques. The performance of the regression model is evaluated using Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE),Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error(MAPE). In a days and water table depth prediction phase Support, Vector Regressor, Deep Neural Network, and TabNet Regressor are used, and compare the results with our proposed Ensemble Number of Days (E-NOD) and Ensemble Water Table depth (E-WTD) Regressor model. E-NOD and E-WTD models achieved less MAE, RMSE, and MSE than other machine learning methods.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising methodology for collaboratively training machine learning models on decentralized devices. Notwithstanding, the effective synchronization and consolidation of model updates originating from diverse devices, in conjunction with the appropriate configuration of network topologies, persist as crucial obstacles. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the current techniques and methodologies utilized in the synchronization, consolidation, and network topologies of Federated Learning. The present study explores diverse synchronization strategies utilized for the purpose of coordinating model updates from geographically distributed cross-silo edge nodes. The study takes into account several factors, including communication efficiency and privacy preservation. This study delves into the intricacies of model consolidation techniques, such as weighted and personalized aggregation methods, to evaluate their efficacy in consolidation of local model updates into a global model, while taking into consideration statistical heterogeneity and resource constraints. In addition, an examination is conducted on the importance of network topologies in Federated Learning (FL), taking into account their influence on communication efficacy, confidentiality, expandability, resilience, and resource allocation. The survey assesses and contrasts the efficacies and constraints of extant methodologies, discerns deficiencies in present investigations, and provides insights for future progressions. The objective of this survey is to provide a thorough examination of FL synchronization, consolidation, and network topologies, with the intention of offering a valuable reference for individuals engaged in Federated Learning, including researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders. This survey aims to support the advancement of more effective and resilient FL systems.

A brain tumor is the growth of abnormal cells in certain brain tissues with a high mortality rate; therefore, it requires high precision in diagnosis, as a minor human judgment can eventually cause severe consequences. Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) serves as a non-invasive tool to detect the presence of a tumor. However, Rician noise is inevitably instilled during the image acquisition process, which leads to poor observation and interferes with the treatment. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems can perform early diagnosis of the disease, potentially increasing the chances of survival, and lessening the need for an expert to analyze the MRIs. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have proven to be very effective in tumor detection in brain MRIs. There have been multiple studies dedicated to brain tumor classification; however, these techniques lack the evaluation of the impact of the Rician noise on state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and the consideration of the scaling impact on the performance of the deep learning as the size and location of tumors vary from image to image with irregular shape and boundaries. Moreover, transfer learning-based pre-trained models such as AlexNet and ResNet have been used for brain tumor detection. However, these architectures have many trainable parameters and hence have a high computational cost. This study proposes a two-fold solution: (a) Multi-Scale CNN (MSCNN) architecture to develop a robust classification model for brain tumor diagnosis, and (b) minimizing the impact of Rician noise on the performance of the MSCNN. The proposed model is a multi-class classification solution that classifies MRIs into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and non-tumor. The core objective is to develop a robust model for enhancing the performance of the existing tumor detection systems in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, MRIs are denoised using a Fuzzy Similarity-based Non-Local Means (FSNLM) filter to improve the classification results. Different evaluation metrics are employed, such as accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score, to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed multi-scale CNN and other state-of-the-art techniques, such as AlexNet and ResNet. In addition, trainable and non-trainable parameters of the proposed model and the existing techniques are also compared to evaluate the computational efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed multi-scale CNN model outperforms AlexNet and ResNet in terms of accuracy and efficiency at a lower computational cost. Based on experimental results, it is found that our proposed MCNN2 achieved accuracy and F1-score of 91.2% and 91%, respectively, which is significantly higher than the existing AlexNet and ResNet techniques. Moreover, our findings suggest that the proposed model is more effective and efficient in facilitating clinical research and practice for MRI classification.

During the last decade, substantial resources have been invested to exploit massive amounts of boreholes data collected through groundwater extraction. Furthermore, boreholes depth can be considered one of the crucial factors in digging borehole efficiency. Therefore, a new solution is needed to process and analyze boreholes data to monitor digging operations and identify the boreholes shortcomings. This research study presents a boreholes data analysis architecture based on data and predictive analysis models to improve borehole efficiency, underground safety verification, and risk evaluation. The proposed architecture aims to process and analyze borehole data based on different hydrogeological characteristics using data and predictive analytics to enhance underground safety verification and planning of borehole resources. The proposed architecture is developed based on two modules; descriptive data analysis and predictive analysis modules. The descriptive analysis aims to utilize data and clustering analysis techniques to process and extract hidden hydrogeological characteristics from borehole history data. The predictive analysis aims to develop a bi-directional long short-term memory (BD-LSTM) to predict the boreholes depth to minimize the cost and time of the digging operations. Furthermore, different performance measures are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed clustering and regression models. Moreover, our proposed BD-LSTM model is evaluated and compared with conventional machine learning (ML) regression models. The $R^{2}$ score of the proposed BD-LSTM is 0.989, which indicates that the proposed model accurately and precisely predicts boreholes depth compared to the conventional regression models. The experimental and comparative analysis results reveal the significance and effectiveness of the proposed borehole data analysis architecture. The experimental results will improve underground safety management and the efficiency of boreholes for future wells.

Drilling data for groundwater extraction incur changes over time due to variations in hydrogeological and weather conditions. At any time, if there is a need to deploy a change in drilling operations, drilling companies keep monitoring the time-series drilling data to make sure it is not introducing any changes or new errors. Therefore, a solution is needed to predict groundwater levels (GWL) and detect a change in boreholes data to improve drilling efficiency. The proposed study presents an ensemble GWL prediction (E-GWLP) model using boosting and bagging models based on stacking techniques to predict GWL for enhancing hydraulic resource management and planning. The proposed research study consists of two modules; descriptive analysis of boreholes data and GWL prediction model using ensemble model based on stacking. First, descriptive analysis techniques, such as correlation analysis and difference mechanisms, are applied to investigate boreholes log data for extracting underlying characteristics, which is critical for enhancing hydraulic resource management. Second, an ensemble prediction model is developed based on multiple hydrological patterns using robust machine learning (ML) techniques to predict GWL for enhancing drilling efficiency and water resource management. The architecture of the proposed ensemble model involves three boosting algorithms as base models (level-0) and a bagging algorithm as a meta-model that combines the base models predictions (level-1). The base models consist of the following boosting algorithms; eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB). The meta-model includes Random Forest (RF) as a bagging algorithm referred to as a level-1 model. Furthermore, different evaluation metrics are used, including mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score. The performance of the proposed E-GWLP model is compared with existing ensemble and baseline models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model performed accurately in respect of MAE, MSE, and RMSE of 0.340, 0.564, and 0.751, respectively. The MAPE and R2 score of our proposed approach is 12.658 and 0.976, respectively, which signifies the importance of our work. Moreover, experimental results suggest that E-GWLP model is suitable for sustainable water resource management and improves reservoir engineering.

Home appliances are considered to account for a large portion of smart homes’ energy consumption. This is due to the abundant use of IoT devices. Various home appliances, such as heaters, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners, are used every day. It is thought that proper control of these home appliances can reduce significant amounts of energy use. For this purpose, optimization techniques focusing mainly on energy reduction are used. Current optimization techniques somewhat reduce energy use but overlook user convenience, which was the main goal of introducing home appliances. Therefore, there is a need for an optimization method that effectively addresses the trade-off between energy saving and user convenience. Current optimization techniques should include weather metrics other than temperature and humidity to effectively optimize the energy cost of controlling the desired indoor setting of a smart home for the user. This research work involves an optimization technique that addresses the trade-off between energy saving and user convenience, including the use of air pressure, dew point, and wind speed. To test the optimization, a hybrid approach utilizing GWO and PSO was modeled. This work involved enabling proactive energy optimization using appliance energy prediction. An LSTM model was designed to test the appliances’ energy predictions. Through predictions and optimized control, smart home appliances could be proactively and effectively controlled. First, we evaluated the RMSE score of the predictive model and found that the proposed model results in low RMSE values. Second, we conducted several simulations and found the proposed optimization results to provide energy cost savings used in appliance control to regulate the desired indoor setting of the smart home. Energy cost reduction goals using the optimization strategies were evaluated for seasonal and monthly patterns of data for result verification. Hence, the proposed work is considered a better candidate solution for proactively optimizing the energy of smart homes.

Energy consumption is increasing daily, and with that comes a continuous increase in energy costs. Predicting future energy consumption and building an effective energy management system for smart homes has become essential for many industrialists to solve the problem of energy wastage. Machine learning has shown significant outcomes in the field of energy management systems. This paper presents a comprehensive predictive-learning based framework for smart home energy management systems. We propose five modules: classification, prediction, optimization, scheduling, and controllers. In the classification module, we classify the category of users and appliances by using k-means clustering and support vector machine based classification. We predict the future energy consumption and energy cost for each user category using long-term memory in the prediction module. We define objective functions for optimization and use grey wolf optimization and particle swarm optimization for scheduling appliances. For each case, we give priority to user preferences and indoor and outdoor environmental conditions. We define control rules to control the usage of appliances according to the schedule while prioritizing user preferences and minimizing energy consumption and cost. We perform experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed methodology, and the results show that our proposed approach significantly reduces energy cost while providing an optimized solution for energy consumption that prioritizes user preferences and considers both indoor and outdoor environmental factors.

The shift of the world in the past two decades towards renewable energy (RES), due to the continuously decreasing fossil fuel reserves and their bad impact on the environment, has attracted researchers all around the world to improve the efficiency of RES and eliminate problems that arise at the point of common coupling (PCC). Harmonics and un-balance in 3-phase voltages because of dynamic and nonlinear loads cause a lagging power factor due to inductive load, active power losses, and instability at the point of common coupling. This also happens due to a lack of system inertia in micro-grids. Passive filters are used to eliminate harmonics at both the electrical converter’s input and output sides and improve the system’s power factor. A Synchronous Reference Frame (SRF) control method is used to overcome the problem related to grid synchronization. The sine pulse width modulation (SPWM) technique provides gating signals to the switches of the multilevel inverter. A multi-layer feed forward neural network (ML-FFNN) is employed at the output of a system to minimize mean square error (MSE) by removing the errors between target voltages and reference voltages produced at the output of a trained model. Simulations were performed using MATLAB Simulink to highlight the significance of the proposed research study. The simulation results show that our proposed intelligent control scheme used for the suppression of harmonics compensated for reactive power more effectively than the SRF-based control methods. The simulation-based results confirm that the proposed ML-FFNN-based harmonic and reactive power control technique performs 0.752 better in terms of MAE, 0.52 for the case of MSE, and 0.222 when evaluating based on the RMSE.

Presently, blockchain technology has been widely applied in various application domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain management, healthcare, etc. So far, there has been much confusion about whether blockchain performs with scale, and admittedly, a lack of information about best practices that can improve the performance and scale. This paper proposes a novel blockchain network construction methodology to improve the performance of Hyperledger Fabric. As a highly scalable permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric supports a wide range of enterprise use cases from finance to governance. A comprehensive evaluation is performed by observing various configurable network components that can affect the blockchain performance. To demonstrate the significance of the proposed methodology, we set up the experiment environment for the baseline and the test network using optimized parameters, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the test network's performance is enhanced effectively compared to the baseline in transaction throughput and transaction latency.

Pakistan receives Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) exceeding 2000 kWh/m²/annum on approximately 83% of its land, which is very suitable for photovoltaic production. This energy can be easily utilized in conjunction with other renewable energy resources to meet the energy demands and reduce the carbon footprint of the country. In this research, a hybrid renewable energy solution based on a nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB) model is proposed for a university facility. The building in consideration has a continuous flow of water through its water delivery vertical pipelines. A horizontal-axis spherical helical turbine is designed in SolidWorks and is analyzed through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis in ANSYS Fluent 18.1 based on the K-epsilon turbulent model. Results obtained from ANSYS Fluent have shown that a 24 feet vertical channel with a water flow of 0.2309 m3/s and velocity of 12.66 m/s can run the designed hydroelectric turbine, delivering 168 W of mechanical power at 250 r.p.m. Based on the turbine, a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) comprising photovoltaic and hydroelectric power is modelled and analyzed in HOMER Pro software. Among different architectures, it was found that architecture with hydroelectric and photovoltaic energy provided the best COE of $0.09418.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as an advancement over the traditional Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) towards achieving a more efficient intelligent transportation system that is capable of providing various intelligent services and supporting different applications for the drivers and passengers on roads. In order for the IoV and VANETs environments to be able to offer such beneficial road services, huge amounts of data are generated and exchanged among the different communicated entities in these vehicular networks wirelessly via open channels, which could attract the adversaries and threaten the network with several possible types of security attacks. In this survey, we target the authentication part of the security system while highlighting the efficiency of blockchains in the IoV and VANETs environments. First, a detailed background on IoV and blockchain is provided, followed by a wide range of security requirements, challenges, and possible attacks in vehicular networks. Then, a more focused review is provided on the recent blockchain-based authentication schemes in IoV and VANETs with a detailed comparative study in terms of techniques used, network models, evaluation tools, and attacks counteracted. Lastly, some future challenges for IoV security are discussed that are necessary to be addressed in the upcoming research.

The scientific community has presented various citation classification models to refute the concept of pure quantitative citation analysis systems wherein all citations are treated equally. However, a small number of benchmark datasets exist, which makes the asymmetric citation data-driven modeling quite complex. These models classify citations for varying reasons, mostly harnessing metadata and content-based features derived from research papers. Presently, researchers are more inclined toward binary citation classification with the belief that exploiting the datasets of incomplete nature in the best possible way is adequate to address the issue. We argue that contemporary ML citation classification models overlook essential aspects while selecting the appropriate features that hinder elutriating the asymmetric citation data. This study presents a novel binary citation classification model exploiting a list of potential natural language processing (NLP) based features. Machine learning classifiers, including SVM, KLR, and RF, are harnessed to classify citations into important and non-important classes. The evaluation is performed using two benchmark data sets containing a corpus of around 953 paper-citation pairs annotated by the citing authors and domain experts. The study outcomes exhibit that the proposed model outperformed the contemporary approaches by attaining a precision of 0.88.

This paper presents an enhanced PDR-BLE compensation mechanism for improving indoor localization, which is considerably resilient against variant uncertainties. The proposed method of ePDR-BLE compensation mechanism (EPBCM) takes advantage of the non-requirement of linearization of the system around its current state in an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and Kalman filter (KF) in smoothing of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values. In this paper, a fusion of conflicting information and the activity detection approach of an object in an indoor environment contemplates varying magnitude of accelerometer values based on the hidden Markov model (HMM). On the estimated orientation, the proposed approach remunerates the inadvertent body acceleration and magnetic distortion sensor data. Moreover, EPBCM can precisely calculate the velocity and position by reducing the position drift, which gives rise to a fault in zero-velocity and heading error. The developed EPBCM localization algorithm using Bluetooth low energy beacons (BLE) was applied and analyzed in an indoor environment. The experiments conducted in an indoor scenario shows the results of various activities performed by the object and achieves better orientation estimation, zero velocity measurements, and high position accuracy than other methods in the literature.

Over the past years, numerous Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare systems have been developed to monitor patient health conditions, but these traditional systems do not adapt to constraints imposed by revolutionized IoT technology. IoT-based healthcare systems are considered mission-critical applications whose missing deadlines cause critical situations. For example, in patients with chronic diseases or other fatal diseases, a missed task could lead to fatalities. This study presents a smart patient health monitoring system (PHMS) based on an optimized scheduling mechanism using IoT-tasks orchestration architecture to monitor vital signs data of remote patients. The proposed smart PHMS consists of two core modules: a healthcare task scheduling based on optimization and optimization of healthcare services using a real-time IoT-based task orchestration architecture. First, an optimized time-constraint-aware scheduling mechanism using a real-time IoT-based task orchestration architecture is developed to generate autonomous healthcare tasks and effectively handle the deployment of emergent healthcare tasks. Second, an optimization module is developed to optimize the services of the e-Health industry based on objective functions. Furthermore, our study uses Libelium e-Health toolkit to monitors the physiological data of remote patients continuously. The experimental results reveal that an optimized scheduling mechanism reduces the tasks starvation by 14% and tasks failure by 17% compared to a conventional fair emergency first (FEF) scheduling mechanism. The performance analysis results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, and it suggests that the proposed solution can be an effective and sustainable solution towards monitoring patient’s vital signs data in the IoT-based e-Health domain.

The generalization error of conventional support vector machine (SVM) depends on the ratio of two factors; radius and margin. The traditional SVM aims to maximize margin but ignore minimization of radius, which decreases the overall performance of the SVM classifier. However, different approaches are developed to achieve a trade-off between the margin and radius. Still, the computational cost of all these approaches is high due to the requirements of matrix transformation. Furthermore, a conventional SVM tries to set the best hyperplane between classes, and due to some robust kernel tricks, an SVM is used in many non-linear and complex problems. The configuration of the best hyperplane between classes is not effective; therefore, it is required to bind a class within its limited area to enhance the performance of the SVM classifier. The area enclosed by a class is called its Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB), and it is one of the emerging problems of SVM. Therefore, a robust solution is needed to improve the performance of the conventional SVM to overcome the highlighted issues. In this research study, a novel weighted radius SVM (WR-SVM) is proposed to determine the tighter bounds of MEB. The proposed solution uses a weighted mean to find tighter bounds of radius, due to which the size of MEB decreases. Experiments are conducted on nine different benchmark datasets and one synthetic dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The experimental results reveal that the proposed WR-SVM significantly performed well compared to the conventional SVM classifier. Furthermore, experimental results are compared with F-SVM and traditional SVM in terms of classification accuracy to demonstrate the significance of the proposed WR-SVM.

Due to the availability of smart metering infrastructure, high-resolution electric consumption data is readily available to study the dynamics of residential electric consumption at finely resolved spatial and temporal scales. Analyzing the electric consumption data enables the policymakers and building owners to understand consumer’s demand-consumption behaviors. Furthermore, analysis and accurate forecasting of electric consumption are substantial for consumer involvement in time-of-use tariffs, critical peak pricing, and consumer-specific demand response initiatives. Alongside its vast economic and sustainability implications, such as energy wastage and decarbonization of the energy sector, accurate consumption forecasting facilitates power system planning and stable grid operations. Energy consumption forecasting is an active research area; despite the abundance of devised models, electric consumption forecasting in residential buildings remains challenging due to high occupant energy use behavior variability. Hence the search for an appropriate model for accurate electric consumption forecasting is ever continuing. To this aim, this paper presents a spatial and temporal ensemble forecasting model for short-term electric consumption forecasting. The proposed work involves exploring electric consumption profiles at the apartment level through cluster analysis based on the k-means algorithm. The ensemble forecasting model consists of two deep learning models; Long Short-Term Memory Unit (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). First, the apartment-level historical electric consumption data is clustered. Later the clusters are aggregated based on consumption profiles of consumers. At the building and floor level, the ensemble models are trained using aggregated electric consumption data. The proposed ensemble model forecasts the electric consumption at three spatial scales apartment, building, and floor level for hourly, daily, and weekly forecasting horizon. Furthermore, the impact of spatial-temporal granularity and cluster analysis on the prediction accuracy is analyzed. The dataset used in this study comprises high-resolution electric consumption data acquired through smart meters recorded on an hourly basis over the period of one year. The consumption data belongs to four multifamily residential buildings situated in an urban area of South Korea. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed forecasting model, we compared our model with widely known machine learning models and deep learning variants. The results achieved by our proposed ensemble scheme verify that model has learned the sequential behavior of electric consumption by producing superior performance with the lowest MAPE of 4.182 and 4.54 at building and floor level prediction, respectively. The experimental findings suggest that the model has efficiently captured the dynamic electric consumption characteristics to exploit ensemble model diversities and achieved lower forecasting error. The proposed ensemble forecasting scheme is well suited for predictive modeling and short-term load forecasting.

In today’s world, smart buildings are considered an overarching system that automates a building’s complex operations and increases security while reducing environmental impact. One of the primary goals of building management systems is to promote sustainable and efficient use of energy, requiring coherent task management and execution of control commands for actuators. This paper proposes a predictive-learning framework based on contextual feature selection and optimal actuator control mechanism for minimizing energy consumption in smart buildings. We aim to assess multiple parameters and select the most relevant contextual features that would optimize energy consumption. We have implemented an artificial neural network-based particle swarm optimization (ANN-PSO) algorithm for predictive learning to train the framework on feature importance. Based on the relevance of attributes, our model was also capable of re-adding features. The extracted features are then applied as input parameters for the training of long short-term memory (LSTM) and optimal control module. We have proposed an objective function using a velocity boost-particle swarm optimization (VB-PSO) algorithm that reduces energy cost for optimal control. We then generated and defined the control tasks based on the fuzzy rule set and optimal values obtained from VB-PSO. We compared our model’s performance with and without feature selection using the root mean square error (RMSE) metric in the evaluation section. This paper also presents how optimal control can reduce energy cost and improve performance resulting from lesser learning cycles and decreased error rates.

The rapid demand for Cloud services resulted in the establishment of large-scale Cloud Data Centers (CDCs), which ultimately consume a large amount of energy. An enormous amount of energy consumption eventually leads to high operating costs and carbon emissions. To reduce energy consumption with efficient resource utilization, various dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation approaches (i.e., Predictive Anti-Correlated Placement Algorithm (PACPA), Resource-Utilization-Aware Energy Efficient (RUAEE), Memory-bound Pre-copy Live Migration (MPLM), m Mixed migration strategy, Memory/disk operation aware Live VM Migration (MLLM), etc.) have been considered. Most of these techniques do aggressive VM consolidation that eventually results in performance degradation of CDCs in terms of resource utilization and energy consumption. In this paper, an Efficient Adaptive Migration Algorithm (EAMA) is proposed for effective migration and placement of VMs on the Physical Machines (PMs) dynamically. The proposed approach has two distinct features: first, selection of PM locations with optimum access delay where the VMs are required to be migrated, and second, reduces the number of VM migrations. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted using the CloudSim toolkit. The results of the proposed approach are compared with the PACPA and RUAEE algorithms in terms of Service-Level Agreement (SLA) violation, resource utilization, number of hosts shut down, and energy consumption. Results show that proposed EAMA approach significantly reduces the number of migrations by 16% and 24%, SLA violation by 20% and 34%, and increases the resource utilization by 8% to 17% with increased number of hosts shut down from 10% to 13% as compared to the PACPA and RUAEE, respectively. Moreover, a 13% improvement in energy consumption has also been observed.

With the development of modern power systems (smart grid), energy consumption prediction becomes an essential aspect of resource planning and operations. In the last few decades, industrial and commercial buildings have thoroughly been investigated for consumption patterns. However, due to the unavailability of data, the residential buildings could not get much attention. During the last few years, many solutions have been devised for predicting electric consumption; however, it remains a challenging task due to the dynamic nature of residential consumption patterns. Therefore, a more robust solution is required to improve the model performance and achieve a better prediction accuracy. This paper presents an ensemble approach based on learning to a statistical model to predict the short-term energy consumption of a multifamily residential building. Our proposed approach utilizes Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Kalman Filter (KF) to build an ensemble prediction model to predict short term energy demands of multifamily residential buildings. The proposed approach uses real energy data acquired from the multifamily residential building, South Korea. Different statistical measures are used, such as mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score, to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with existing models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach predicts accurately and outperforms the existing models. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is performed to evaluate and compare the proposed model with conventional machine learning models. The experimental results show the effectiveness and significance of the proposed approach compared to existing energy prediction models. The proposed approach will support energy management to effectively plan and manage the energy supply and demands of multifamily residential buildings.

Blockchain technology has recently inspired remarkable attention due to its unique features, such as privacy, accountability, immutability, and anonymity, to name of the few. In contrast, core functionalities of most Internet of Things (IoT) resources make them vulnerable to security threats. The IoT devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have limited capacity in terms of network, computing, and storage, which make them easier for vulnerable threats. Furthermore, a massive amount of data produced by the IoT devices, which is still an open challenge for the existing platforms to process, analyze, and unearth underlying patterns to provide convenience environment. Therefore, a new solution is required to ensure data accountability, improve data privacy and accessibility, and extract hidden patterns and useful knowledge to provide adequate services. In this paper, we present a secure fitness framework that is based on an IoT-enabled blockchain network integrated with machine learning approaches. The proposed framework consists of two modules: a blockchain-based IoT network to provide security and integrity to sensing data as well as an enhanced smart contract enabled relationship and inference engine to discover hidden insights and useful knowledge from IoT and user device network data. The enhanced smart contract aims to support users with a practical application that provides real-time monitoring, control, easy access, and immutable logs of multiple devices that are deployed in several domains. The inference engine module aims to unearth underlying patterns and useful knowledge from IoT environment data, which helps in effective decision making to provide convenient services. For experimental analysis, we implement an intelligent fitness service that is based on an enhanced smart contract enabled relationship and inference engine as a case study where several IoT fitness devices are used to securely acquire user personalized fitness data. Furthermore, a real-time inference engine investigates user personalized data to discover useful knowledge and hidden insights. Based on inference engine knowledge, a recommendation model is developed to recommend a daily and monthly diet, as well as a workout plan for better and improved body shape. The recommendation model aims to facilitate a trainer formulating effective future decisions of trainee’s health in terms of a diet and workout plan. Lastly, for performance analysis, we have used Hyperledger Caliper to access the system performance in terms of latency, throughput, resource utilization, and varying orderer and peers nodes. The analysis results imply that the design architecture is applicable for resource-constrained IoT blockchain platform and it is extensible for different IoT scenarios.

Internet of Things is advancing, and the augmented role of smart navigation in automating processes is at its vanguard. Smart navigation and location tracking systems are finding increasing use in the area of the mission-critical indoor scenario, logistics, medicine, and security. A demanding emerging area is an Indoor Localization due to the increased fascination towards location-based services. Numerous inertial assessments unit-based indoor localization mechanisms have been suggested in this regard. However, these methods have many shortcomings pertaining to accuracy and consistency. In this study, we propose a novel position estimation system based on learning to the prediction model to address the above challenges. The designed system consists of two modules; learning to prediction module and position estimation using sensor fusion in an indoor environment. The prediction algorithm is attached to the learning module. Moreover, the learning module continuously controls, observes, and enhances the efficiency of the prediction algorithm by evaluating the output and taking into account the exogenous factors that may have an impact on its outcome. On top of that, we reckon a situation where the prediction algorithm can be applied to anticipate the accurate gyroscope and accelerometer reading from the noisy sensor readings. In the designed system, we consider a scenario where the learning module, based on Artificial Neural Network, and Kalman filter are used as a prediction algorithm to predict the actual accelerometer and gyroscope reading from the noisy sensor reading. Moreover, to acquire data, we use the next-generation inertial measurement unit, which contains a 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope data. Finally, for the performance and accuracy of the proposed system, we carried out numbers of experiments, and we observed that the proposed Kalman filter with learning module performed better than the traditional Kalman filter algorithm in terms of root mean square error metric.

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhance the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technology have revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturized healthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcare system. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoring status both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing more data to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharing personal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interaction with and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meet these requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures. The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed by the government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data for medical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceutical industry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper, we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based on blockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which is an enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. This approach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, and global access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkit is used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system is evaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization using a standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed system outperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.

With the gradual popularization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and the development of wireless networking technologies, the use of heterogeneous devices and runtime verification of task fulfillment with different constraints are required in real-world IoT scenarios. As far as IoT systems are concerned, most of them are built on centralized architectures, which reveal various assailable points in data security and privacy threats. Hence, this paper aims to investigate these issues by delegating the responsibility of a verification monitor from a centralized architecture to a decentralized manner using blockchain technology. We present a smart contract-based task management scheme to provide runtime verification of device behaviors and allows trustworthy access control to these devices. The business logic of the proposed system is specified by the smart contract, which automates all time-consuming processes cryptographically and correctly. The usability of the proposed solution is further demonstrated by implementing a prototype application in which the Hyperledger Fabric is utilized to implement the business logic for runtime verification and access control with one desktop and one Raspberry Pi. A comprehensive evaluation experiment is conducted, and the results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.

Recently, technology startups have leveraged the potential of blockchain-based technologies to govern institutions or interpersonal trust by enforcing signed treaties among different individuals in a decentralized environment. However, it is going to be hard enough convincing that the blockchain technology could completely replace the trust among trading partners in the sharing economy as sharing services always operate in a highly dynamic environment. With the rapid expanding of the rental market, the sharing economy faces more and more severe challenges in the form of regulatory uncertainty and concerns about abuses. This paper proposes an enhanced decentralized sharing economy service using the service level agreement (SLA), which documents the services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. The SLA specifications are defined as the smart contract, which facilitates multi-user collaboration and automates the process with no involvement of the third party. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed solution in the sharing economy, a notebook sharing case study is implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric. The functionalities of the smart contract are tested using the Hyperledger Composer. Moreover, the efficiency of the designed approach is demonstrated through a series of experimental tests using different performance metrics.

With the rapid development of communication technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is getting out of its infancy, into full maturity, and tends to be developed in an explosively rapid way, with more and more data transmitted and processed. As a result, the ability to manage devices deployed worldwide has been given more and advanced requirements in practical application performances. Most existing IoT platforms are highly centralized architectures, which suffer from various technical limitations, such as a cyber-attack and single point of failure. A new solution direction is essential to enhance data accessing, while regulating it with government mandates in privacy and security. In this paper, we propose an integrated IoT platform using blockchain technology to guarantee sensing data integrity. The aim of this platform is to afford the device owner a practical application that provides a comprehensive, immutable log and allows easy access to their devices deployed in different domains. It also provides characteristics of general IoT systems, allows for real-time monitoring, and control between the end user and device. The business logic of the application is defined by the smart contract, which contains rules and conditions. The proposed approach is backed by a proof of concept implementation in realistic IoT scenarios, utilizing Raspberry Pi devices and a permissioned network called Hyperledger Fabric. Lastly, a benchmark study using various performance metrics is made to highlight the significance of the proposed work. The analysis results indicate that the designed platform is suitable for the resource-constrained IoT architecture and is scalable to be extended in various IoT scenarios.

Researchers have reached a consensus on the thermal discomfort known as the major cause of sick building syndrome, which hurts people’s health and working efficiency greatly. As a result, the thermal environment satisfaction is important and thus many studies have been dedicated to thermal comfort over the past few decades. Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) is one of the globally used standards to express users’ comfort satisfaction with the given thermal moderate environments. It has been widely used in most of the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems to maintain this standard of thermal comfort for occupants of buildings. However, the PMV model is developed on indoor experimental data without taking into account conditions of outdoor space, which greatly affects the performance of the existing HVAC systems and varies with the seasons. In this paper, an enhanced Model-based Predictive Control practical system for maintaining the indoor thermal comfort is demonstrated, including a multiple linear regression predictive model and an innovative fuzzy controller considering both the PMV index and the outdoor environment conditions. To verify the usability of the designed system, an Internet of Things (IoT) smart space prototype was chosen and experimentally tested in a building in Jeju, Korea. Moreover, thermal comfort regulation performances using the proposed approach have been compared with the existing one. The results of our work indicate that the proposed solution is capable of optimizing the thermal comfort condition according to seasonality and outperforms the conventional approaches in different performance indexes.