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The employees, as stakeholders of the organization, can contribute to the development and productiveness of the organization. In regards to satisfaction/dissatisfaction, the opinion of employees can perform dual rule. Firstly, it supports the organization to plan future strategies and enhance their yield; secondly, it can be helpful for aspirants in seeking their best choice. In this concern, we have classified the reviews of employees using two different modules. In the first module, we have experimented on ratings of reviews; then in the second module, the textual part of the reviews is used to classify employees as satisfied/unsatisfied. After that, the reasonable outcomes of both approaches are unified for the final prediction of reported reviews as proper/improper. For this purpose, we have implemented a purely supervised machine learning approach. The performance of state of the art classifiers along with TF-IDF (Term frequency-Inverse document frequency) and BoW (Bag-of word) is analyzed in the text module. In this comparison, ETC (Extra tree classifier) performed best in terms of accuracy in both modules. It shows 100% accuracy with rating and 79% accuracy with the textual part. Ultimately, we have implemented AND gate for the evaluation of proper/improper reviews. The results of AND gate evaluate that 76% of the reviews of employees are reported as properly and 24% are reported as improperly in the used dataset.

Cyber-physical system (CPS) provides a well-organized integration between communication , computation , and control (3C) technologies. CPS has been widely used in the vehicular networks and it requires to discover multimodal data from the physical system to make appropriate decisions and actions, for example, congestion warnings, applying brakes, adjusting speed limits, etc. Information discovery and availability at individual network elements is one of the fundamental foundations of CPS. In this paper, we proposed two multimodal network information discovery schemes for vehicular CPS using the Named Data Networking (NDN). One of the proposed schemes simply modifies the pull-based NDN communication mechanism to discover multimodal multi-hop data from the network and the other scheme uses the Interest broadcast suppression (IBS) mechanism. The proposed Interest broadcast suppression scheme adapts the holding time technique to defer the Interest forwarding and its computation involves the hop-count, distance, and other network parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes discover about 172 and 162 percent more multimodal information from approximately 283 and 210 percent more network area by suppressing approximately 50 percent of the Interest broadcast storm in highway and the urban traffic scenarios, respectively.

In this paper, the superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4 standard is improved to meet the adaptive data traffic requirements of hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, sensor nodes send their data implicitly by using the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) to their PAN coordinator. The standard does not meet the adaptive data requirements of GTS requesting nodes. If requesting GTSs in an active period are more or less than the available limit, then either the requested nodes will not be entertained or GTSs remain underutilized. Consequently, it may cause unnecessary delays or poor GTS utilization. In this work, an Enhanced Superframe offering Adaptive Duty cycle (ESAD) is proposed. ESAD adapts the active period in accordance with the requested data. In addition, the actual size of GTS has been halved to accommodate more GTS requesting nodes. The shortest job first algorithm is applied to scrutinize the requested GTS nodes. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme increases the link utilization, improves the data transmission, reduces the delay, and allows more nodes to transfer their data in a specified superframe.

Large number of services and heterogeneity of the objects have made Internet of Things (IoT) a complex paradigm. It is necessary to placate the requirements of quality of service metrics for IoT model of urban development. Rapid delivery and continuation of services to the customers without delay, is first and foremost requisite. Applications of IoT, require service centered IoT model which should be stable, scalable, energy efficient and re-configurable. This paper, proposes a service oriented cross layer solution for IoT–QoS architecture. In the three layer model, QoS module at the application layer exploits the optimization by exhausting the acquaintance of each component. Network layer deals with the issues of transmission of packets in energy efficient manner where stability plays a crucial role for the heterogeneous objects. Resources are allocated and reallocated to the requested services in optimal way at sensing layer. The proposed IoT–QoS model for urban development applications is capable of optimizing the traditional methods and encases the network lifetime by minimizing the energy consumption.

Effective resource allocation has always been one of the serious challenges in wireless communication. A considerable number of machine type communication (MTC) devices in 5G with variable quality of service (QoS) aggravates this challenge even further. Existing Resource allocation schemes in MTC are usually considering signal to noise ratio (SNR), which provides preference to MTC devices based on distance rather than their QoS requirements. This paper proposes a resource allocation scheme with dynamic priorities for MTC devices with multiple radio access technologies (RATs). The proposed resource allocation scheme has two main parts namely medium access and resource allocation. The medium access leverages the broadcast nature of wireless signal and MTC devices’ wait time to assign priorities using capillary band in a secure and integral way. At resource allocation, SNR, total induced transmission delay, and transmission-awaiting MTC devices are used to assign resources in the cellular band. The rumination of two-staged dynamic priorities in the proposed scheduling scheme brings significant performance improvements in outage and success probabilities. Compared to SNR-based schemes, the proposed mechanism performs well by expressively improving the outage and success probability by 20% and 30%, respectively.

Conventionally, a node or vehicle in the Named Data Networking (NDN) sends an interest packet to discover information and receives a single data packet in response. However, in the case of named data Vehicular Cyber-Physical System (VCPS), a vehicle may require content from multiple vehicles in the network. Therefore, NDN forwarding daemon must receive multiple data packets in response to a single interest. Moreover, the data broadcast storm worsens in the named data VCPS due to the broadcast nature of the wireless link. In this letter, we propose the data packet broadcast suppression method for any multisource content discovery in VCPS. The proposed scheme distributively selects the potential data forwarding vehicles based on the neighbor distance, node density, and the closeness to the data forwarding line of sight. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme alleviates 55% data traffic, 17% average per-hop delay, and achieves 7% more data discovery ratio.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is the future of the Internet, where everything will be connected. Studies have revealed that fog/edge computing-based services will play a major role in extending the cloud by carrying out intermediary services at the edge of the network. Fog/edge computing-based IoT’s (FECIoT) distributed architecture enhances service provisioning along the Cloud-to-Things continuum, thereby making it suitable for mission-critical applications. Furthermore, the proximity of fog/edge devices to where the data is produced makes it stand-out in terms of resource allocation, service delivery, and privacy. From the business perspective, FECIoT will lead to a boom and spring up of small-to-medium-sized enterprises, thereby encouraging inclusion for all. To this end, we present a comprehensive survey on state-of-the-art IoT literature over the period 2008–2018 and propose the FECIoT framework which covers the enabling technologies, services, and open research issues. A tutorial approach is employed, progressing from basic to more advanced concepts within the IoT domain. Lastly, we show how FECIoT can be deployed in real-life cyber-physical systems, such as the intelligent transportation system, smart grid, smart health-care, smart homes, and smart environment.

Pinching of the current sheath in the plasma focus (PF) device is an important phase to transfer the stored energy to the high density short lived plasma for the production of a group of useful radiations. The current sheath formation during the initial breakdown of the gas is a critical process in the PF operation. In this regard, the understanding of the current sheath dynamics is of prime importance. In this paper, we present the effects of alpha particle induced preionizaion by U238 in 3.3 kJ He operated PF device on the dynamics of current sheath, focus amplitude and axial rundown velocity by employing Rogowski coil and High voltage probe as main diagnostic tools. The formation of parabolic axisymmetric sheath is confirmed by Rogowski coil and high voltage probe signals which also reveals the variation in focusing time as well as amplitude during collapse phase by using the preionization source. Time resolved X-ray diagnostics are also carried out using PIN diodes covered with Al and Mg filte...

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks devices are usually battery powered and thereby their lifetime is limited. This issue leads to lose data measurements and thus to a performance loss of the underlying UWSN application. It also increases the maintenance cost in Internet of Underwater Things scenarios with a huge number of UWSN devices. Additionally, the unique characteristics of UWSNs pose several constraints such as the high energy consumption, long propagation delay, and node mobility. Duty Cycle management is one of the key technologies to solve this issue. In this context, the use of duty cycle based algorithms for opportunistic, autonomous and energy efficient duty cycle management can mitigate the undesirable impact of underwater communications, consequently, improve the overall efficiency of the algorithms designed for the UWSNs. In this article, we study the energy efficient data collection for asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocols for underwater sensor networks. To this end, we improve two previously proposed receiver initiated MAC protocols that use a nodes, (1) residual energy, and (2) its sleep-awake pattern to improve the overall network lifetime. We show that the considerations made in the protocols have a great impact on the performance of the network. Our results show that the protocols minimize the collisions while alleviating the need for excessive handshake and also the average active time of a node is minimized.

Cyber adversaries have moved from conventional cyber threat to being advance, complex, targeted and well-coordinated attackers. These adversaries have come to use Advance Persistent Threat vectors to penetrate classified and large business organizations network by various evasive cyber techniques. This paper presents a systematic review of literature work carried out by different researchers on the topic and also explicates and compares the most significant contributions made by them in this area of APT. The paper addresses the shortfalls in the proposed techniques which will form the areas for further research.

Optical and magnetic features of the A 2 V 2 O 2 ( A = F e and C o ) compounds are explored. Density functional theory (DFT) within a framework of FPLAPW (full-potential linearized augmented plane wave) method, as well as generalized gradient approximation plus the Hubbard parameter (GGA+U) and Hubbard on-site Coulomb interaction corrections are applied. U is evaluated assuming constraint generalized gradient approximation for transition metals Fe/Co and V. The calculated band structures for the Fe doped compounds demonstrate the metallic nature while for the Co doped we observe half metallicity possessing 100% spin polarization in the vicinity of the Fermi level. The influence of Fe/Co and V magnetic moment (μ B ) on the electronic, magnetic and optical features is explored in details additionally. The optical constants reveal the strong response for A 2 V 2 O 2 ( A = F e and C o ) in the IR (infra-red region) and UV (Ultra Violet) regions.

Effect of surface spins in chromium oxide (Cr2O3) coated maghemite (γ-Fe2O3) nanoparticles (13 nm) as prepared by microwave plasma technique have been studied in detail. The temperature dependent zero field cooled/field cooled (ZFC/FC) measurements revealed the blocking temperature at TB = 75 K. Simulated ZFC/FC curves exhibited large value of effective anisotropy of Cr2O3 coated γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles as compared to bulk γ-Fe2O3 but less than bare γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles. Bloch's law was fitted on MS-T data and revealed the values of Bloch's constant B = 3.523 × 10−4 K−b and Bloch's exponent b = 1.10. The higher value of B than in bulk is due to weaker exchange coupling J (B 1/J) on the surface of nanoparticle due to disorder surface spins, while lower value of b is due to no spin wave excitation in presence of large energy band gap at nanoscale. Kneller's law fit on HC-T data deviated in all temperature range which is due to strong surface anisotropy, core-shell interactions and superparamagnetism. Interparticle interactions and spin glass behavior were investigated by using different physical laws for f-dependent ac susceptibility and they confirmed the presence of spin glass behavior which is due to disordered frozen surface spins and random interparticle interactions.

In this paper, we propose a distributed interest forwarder selection (DIFS) scheme that mitigates the interest broadcast storm in vehicular named data networks. In DIFS, a vehicle sends an interest packet piggybacking its location, distance to the neighbors, and speed. In this case, the immediate neighbors do not have the requested content and rank themselves to be an eligible interest forwarder by using multiple attributes. Additionally, every intermediate vehicle uses a digital map to be selected as forwarders in both (forward and backward) directions of the consumer. Simulations show that DIFS satisfies more interest packets with less delay as compared with the recent forwarding solutions.

Using density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we have explored the effect of Ag and Cs atoms on the electronic transport properties of ASbO 3 (A = K, Ag and Cs). We employed first principle calculations for investigation of electronic, optical and thermoelectric properties of ASbO 3 compounds. The exchange and correlation potential (E XC ) was treated by the modified Becke Johnson functional (mBJ). The optimized lattice constants and internal cell parameters were in agreement with the available experimental data. The self-consistence density of state and band-structure calculations show that Cs- d and Ag- d states remains in valence band and dominate below the Fermi level, while Sb- s/p states mainly contribute in conduction band. When Ag and Cs for K substitution take place, there is a gradual hybridization of Cs- d and Ag- d states results. Optical spectra show the main absorption peak in between 8.0 and 13.0 eV depends on the substituent nature and could be due to transition from hybridized band (Sb- d and Sb- s ), below E F to free Ag and Cs- s/p/d states. Frequency-dependent refractive index, n(ω), and the extinction coefficient, k(ω), of ASbO 3 were also calculated for the radiation upto 40 eV. We combined the outputs of DFT to transport theory based on Boltzmann equation to calculate the potential use of the ASbO 3 as thermoelectrics. The change of the alkaline element affected both of electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient and thermal conductivity.

Connected car technology (also referred to as VANET) has gradually paved its way to legislation in several countries and soon will be followed by mass-scale deployment. However, the race between the advancements in technologies and utilization of the available resources have left a question mark on the future of pure VANET. Therefore, the research community together with academia and industry have foreseen the evolution of VANET into VANET-based clouds. The data- or content-centric communication paradigm is the point of convergence in these technologies because the content is shared among different nodes in different forms such as infotainment or safety. However, the current IP-based networking is not an ideal choice for content-centric applications because of its larger overhead for establishing, maintaining, and securing the path, addressing complexity, non-scalability for content, routing and mobility management overhead, and so on. Therefore, the limitations and shortcomings of current IP-based networking and the need for efficient content delivery advocate for a paradigm shift. To this end, a new content-centric networking paradigm, namely NDN, has been employed to address the aforementioned issues related to content-centric networking while using IP-based networking. In this article, we foresee the integration of VANET-based clouds with NDN called NDN-VC for reliable, efficient, robust, and safe intelligent transportation systems. We particularly aim at the architecture and concise naming mechanism for NDN-VC. Furthermore, we also outline the unique future challenges faced by the NDN-VC.

Named data networking (NDN) uses the content name instead of its location within the interest message to locate the content within the network. An interest is broadcasted by the content seeking node over the wireless channel with specific content name and waits for the data message containing the actual content. The broadcast region of an interest is restricted by using the time-to-live (TTL) field of the message. Record of every pending interest is stored in the pending interest table (PIT) for a specific duration, called PIT entry lifetime (PEL). The record is purged when a node either receives the data message or the PEL expires. The size of the PIT has a significant impact on the name prefix search during the interest or data message forwarding process. Additionally, the interest and/or data message loss in the vehicular network is very frequent, which results in a significant PIT size depending on the PEL. Vanilla NDN uses the fixed PEL of $4\text{ s}$ , and the very recent work considers the constant parameters to control the PEL, which fails to reduce the PIT size. Hence, in this paper, we propose a hop limit based adaptive PEL (LAPEL) scheme, which adaptively estimates the PEL at interest forwarding vehicle. LAPEL estimates PEL based on the lower layer parameters and has no constant factor that makes it more adaptive than the previously proposed schemes. Simulation results show that LAPEL has $52\%$ less PEL, reduces $8.4\%$ the PIT size, and achieves $4.5\%$ more interest satisfaction ratio, for any simulated TTL and interest rates.

Electronic word of mouth influences the consumer buying behavior through the online exchange of customer opinions and experiences about commodities using social networking sites. Reviews or comments posted on the Internet by consumers and experts are based on their personal experiences and the evaluation and expert analysis of a product. The current study explains an overview of key elements of eWOM communication antecedents, addresses eWOM motives to analyze food products purchasing factors associated with consumer engagement. We found certain factors of eWOM that should be considered in decision making according to the model for information adoption. It revealed that consumers need for social interaction, economic incentives, and self-worth reinforcement are the primary drivers of eWOM involvement. However, argument quality was found to be more appealing then eWOM source credibility for food product purchasing. Practitioners should make their strategies to follow the credibility standards, trustworthy vehicles, perceived values, informative and digital channels for the enhancement of eWOM communications. eWOM communication is an emerging area, further research can be focused on the meta-analysis of relative factors, such as responses, moderators, and credibility to eWOM communication. Electronic word-of-mouth is an online exchange of customer opinions and experiences.The current study addresses eWOM readership from food product purchasing perspective.Self-worth reinforcement is significantly effective compared to other involvements.eWOM factors for information adoption should be considered in decision-making process.

Modern vehicles equipped with a large number of electronic components, sensors, actuators, and extensive connectivity, are the classical example of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Communication as an integral part of the CPS has enabled and offered many value-added services for vehicular networks. The communication mechanism helps to share contents with all vehicular network nodes and the surrounding environment, e.g., vehicles, traffic lights, and smart road signs, to efficiently take informed and smart decisions. Thus, it opens the doors to many security threats and vulnerabilities. Traditional TCP/IP-based communication paradigm focuses on securing the communication channel instead of the contents that travel through the network. Nevertheless, for content-centered application, content security is more important than communication channel security. To this end, named data networking (NDN) is one of the future Internet architectures that puts the contents at the center of communication and offers embedded content security. In this paper, we first identify the cyberattacks and security challenges faced by the vehicular CPS (VCPS). Next, we propose the NDN-based cyber-resilient, the layered and modular architecture for VCPS. The architecture includes the NDN’s forwarding daemon, threat aversion, detection, and resilience components. A detailed discussion about the functionality of each component is also presented. Furthermore, we discuss the future challenges faced by the integration of NDN with VCPS to realize NDN-based VCPS.

Using the full-potential linearized augmented-plane wave method, the electronic structure and thermoelectric properties of Ag2Sb2O6 and Cd2Sb2O7 compounds have been explored. The modified Becke–Johnson potential was applied to treat the exchange–correlation energy term. The electronic band structures reveal that the valence-band maximum and conduction-band minimum occur at Γ point, indicating that Ag2Sb2O6 and Cd2Sb2O7 are direct energy bandgap semiconductors. Strong hybridization appeared between Ag (Cd)-s/p and O-s/p states. The optical properties, i.e., complex dielectric function, reflectivity, refractive index, and energy loss function, reveal high reflectivity in the ultraviolet energy range, indicating usefulness of these materials in shields from high-energy radiation. Combining transport theory and the outputs from the full-potential linearized augmented-plane wave calculations, the thermoelectric properties were analyzed as functions of temperature. Due to their high thermopower and narrow bandgap, Ag2Sb2O6 and Cd2Sb2O7 are suitable materials for application in optoelectronic and thermoelectric devices.

Named data networking and software defined networking share mutual courage in changing legacy networking architectures. In the case of NDN, IP-based communication has been tackled by naming the data or content itself, while SDN proposes to decouple the control and data planes to make various services manageable without physical interference with switches and routers. Both NDN and SDN also support communication via heterogeneous interfaces and have been recently investigated for vehicular networks. Na�ve VNs are based on the IP-based legacy, which is prone to several issues due to the dynamic network topology among other factors. In this article, we first see both SDN and NDN enabled VNs from a bird's eye view, and for the very first time, we present an architecture that combines SDN functionalities within VNs to retrieve the required content using NDN. Moreover, we discuss a number of current research challenges and provide a precise roadmap that can be considered for the research community to jointly address such challenges.

A smart city enhances the quality of its citizens’ lives by providing ease of access to ubiquitous services through integration using communication systems at the foundation. Additionally, ITS plays a major role in making a metropolitan area into a smart city. The current IP-based solutions for ITS have slanted the performance due to high demand for data on the move, especially when the consumers become the producers. Meanwhile, NDN has evolved as a promising future Internet architecture and is being investigated extensively. In this article, we discuss the core functionality of NDN followed by our new architecture proposed for ITS in smart cities. Also, we highlight the current and future research challenges for NDN-enabled ITS in the context of smart cities.

We reported systematic study on structural and magnetic properties of nickel/nickel oxide (Ni/NiO) nanoparticles annealed under air atmosphere at different temperatures in the range 400–800 °C. The XRD spectra revealed two phases such as Ni and NiO. The average crystallite size increases with increasing annealing temperature. A phase diagram was developed between two phases versus annealing temperature using XRD analysis. At lower annealing temperatures, Ni phase is dominant which does not easily undergo oxidation to form NiO. The NiO phase increases with increasing annealing temperature. FTIR spectroscopy revealed an increase in the NiO phase content at higher annealing temperature, which is in agreement with the XRD analysis. SEM images showed that nanoparticles are well separated at lower annealing temperatures but get agglomerated at higher annealing temperatures. The ferromagnetic (FM) Ni phase content and saturation magnetization (M s ) showed nearly the same trend with increasing annealing temperature. The nanoparticles annealed at 500 °C and 800 °C revealed highest and lowest M s values, respectively, which is in accordance with the XRD phase diagram. Coercivity showed an overall decreasing trend with increasing annealing temperature due to decreased concentration of FM Ni phase and increasing average crystallite size. All these measurements indicate that the structural and magnetic properties of Ni/NiO nanoparticles are strongly influenced by the annealing temperature.

This article explores analytically the dynamics of two-fluid electro-osmotic peristaltic flow through a cylindrical tube. The rheology of the fluid in the central core (inner region or core region) is captured through the Ellis equation. The region adjacent to the wall (outer region or peripheral\ud region) is occupied by a Newtonian fluid. The equations governing the flow in each region are modeled by using the appropriate suppositions of long wavelength and low Reynolds number. Closed form expressions for stream function corresponding to each region are obtained and utilized to determine the axial pressure gradient and the interface between the inner and the outer regions. The pumping characteristics, trapping and reflux phenomena are investigated in detail with reference to the Ellis model parameters and the electro-kinetic slip velocity. The present model also generalizes earlier studies from the literature which can be retrieved as special cases. The\ud analysis shows that pressure drop at zero volumetric flow rate is elevated with increasing occlusion parameter. Trapping and reflux phenomena are mitigated with increasing electro-osmotic slip and shear-thinning effects. At larger value of the occlusion parameter an increase in the power-law index reduces the magnitude of the pressure drop. Increasing Ellis rheological parameter reduces the pressure drop over the entire range of occlusion parameters for the case when the peripheral\ud region fluid viscosity exceeds that of the core region fluid. The results obtained may be applicable in the modulation of peristaltic pumping in the efficient operation of various industrial and biomedical devices.

IEEE 802.15.4 standard is specifically designed for a low-rate and low-processing Internet of things (IoT) applications and offers guaranteed time slots. A beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 consists of a superframe structure that comprises of the contention access period and contention-free period. During contention-free period, nodes transfer their data using guaranteed time slots without any collision. The coordinator node receives data transmission requests in one cycle and allocates guaranteed time slots to the nodes in the next cycle. This allocation process may cause large delay that may not be acceptable for few applications. In this work, a novel superframe structure is proposed that significantly reduces guaranteed time slots allocation delay for the nodes with data requests. The proposed superframe structure comprises of two contention access periods and one contention-free period, where contention-free period precedes both contention access periods with reduced slot size. In addition, the knapsack algorithm is modified for better guaranteed time slots allocation by allowing more guaranteed time slots requesting nodes to send their data as compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The simulation and analytical results show that the proposed superframe structure reduces the network delay by up to 80%, increases contention-free period utilization up to 50%, and allocates guaranteed time slots up to 16 nodes in a single superframe duration.

Vehicular named data network (VNDN) has emerged as a promising network technology, where the focus of communication is moved from host-centric to information-centric. Since, the VNDN is at its early stage in development, there are several open issues to be explored and pending interest table (PIT) management is one of them. In VNDN, PIT stores each broadcasted interest until the required content is retrieved or its timer (PEL: PIT entry lifetime) expires. When the PIT storage is full, the vehicles discard new incoming interests, thus decreasing the network performance. Therefore, in this letter, we propose a dynamic PEL (DPEL) scheme that enables each relaying vehicle to dynamically compute PEL timer for each incoming interest using its interest satisfaction rate (ISR) and the hop count. The higher the ISR and the longer the hop count, the shorter the time the relaying vehicle keeps the PIT entry. Simulation results show DPEL reduces by more than 75% the PEL and the number of entries in VNDN.

Smart cities have been envisioned during the last decade. Moreover, various projects have been initiated to bring this concept into reality. Smart city is basically an emergence of the existing and new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to make our living standard more safe and digitized. Wireless communications, such as sensors, actuators, intelligent transportation systems, and smart grids, have played a vital role in the dissemination of information under the given circumstances. Similarly, it is hard to declare any city as a smart city without taking benefits from wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, with new requirements and delay sensitive applications, the existing WSN requires significant alterations at several layers. In this paper, a new time division multiple access (TDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) protocol, called bitmap-assisted efficient and scalable TDMA-based MAC (BEST-MAC), is proposed for adaptive traffic in hierarchical WSNs that can be deployed in the smart cities. BEST-MAC is specifically designed to improve the quality control of such smart cities applications, where diverse traffic is required and loss or delay in data traffic is unacceptable. The main contributions of BEST-MAC include: 1) it uses small size time slots; 2) the number of those time slots is more than the number of member nodes; 3) knapsack algorithm is used to schedule time slots; and 4) short node address (1 B) is proposed to identify the member nodes. First two contributions of BEST-MAC handle adaptive traffic loads of all members in an efficient manner. The knapsack algorithm not only reduces the job completion time of a node but also minimizes the average packet delay with better link utilization. The short node address reduces the control overhead that improves the energy efficiency. The simulation results verify that the proposed BEST-MAC transmits more data with less delay and energy consumption compared with the existing MAC protocols.

This paper scrutinizes the newly proposed Biswas-Arshed equation with Kerr and power law nonlinearities for soliton propagation through optical fibers, with small group velocity dispersion and in absence of self-phase modulation. Spatio-temporal dispersions of higher order are considered in compensation with group velocity dispersion. In this work, bright, dark, singular and bright-singular combo soliton solutions are retrieved using undetermined coefficients and Kudryashov's methods.

Named data networking has been efficiently utilized in Vehicular networks as a promising solution to enable reliable and efficient content retrieval. Vehicular named data networks (VNDN) employ a pull-based mechanism where an Interest packet is broadcast in order to receive the Content. This forwarding scheme mitigates the forwarding of unsolicited content, however, the dissemination of critical data forwarding generated randomly in the network is not considered. For instance, in the vanilla NDN framework any content received by a vehicle is considered unsolicited and dropped provided no corresponding entry is available in the pending interest table of that vehicle. Despite its potential, some modification in the NDN architecture are required to forward the high priority critical content. In this work, we enable the vehicles' NDN forwarding mechanism to reliably share the critical content from different vehicles sources in the networks. The solution is evaluated in NS2 and the findings show that the proposed scheme is able to collect the data from several vehicles in the networks with reduced network overhead and data retrieval delays.

Vehicular Named Data Network (VNDN) uses NDN as an underlying communication paradigm to realize intelligent transportation system applications. Content communication is the essence of NDN, which is primarily carried out through content naming, forwarding, intrinsic content security, and most importantly the in-network caching. In vehicular networks, vehicles on the road communicate with other vehicles and/or infrastructure network elements to provide passengers a reliable, efficient, and infotainment-rich commute experience. Recently, different aspects of NDN have been investigated in vehicular networks and in vehicular social networks (VSN); however, in this paper, we investigate the in-network caching, realized in NDN through the content store (CS) data structure. As the stale contents in CS do not just occupy cache space, but also decrease the overall performance of NDN-driven VANET and VSN applications, therefore the size of CS and the content lifetime in CS are primary issues in VNDN communications. To solve these issues, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-metric CS management mechanism through cache replacement (M2CRP). We consider the content popularity, relevance, freshness, and distance of a node to devise a set of algorithms for selection of the content to be replaced in CS in the case of replacement requirement. Simulation results show that our multi-metric strategy outperforms the existing cache replacement mechanisms in terms of Hit Ratio.

It is shown that Sm2Zr2O7 possessing significant coexistence of covalent and ionic features demonstrates very promising stiffness features. The corresponding analysis has been performed using density functional theory (DFT). From the chemical bonding nature, it is observed that the crystal shows significant coexistence of covalent, ionic and semiconducting features in UV-VIS spectral range. This crystal is brittle, exhibits higher stiffness. The elastic anisotropy of the crystal is discussed and visualized. It is shown a possibility to use them as highly optical anisotropic materials which are promising for different optoelectronic and photoelastic devices. The origin of the anisotropy and possible changes of the content to improve the optoelectronics and mechanical features are discussed. The performed studies have been based on the full potential linearized augmented plane wave (FP-LAPW) method with generalized gradient plus Hubbard parameter (GGA + U) method. It was discovered a direct type of band energy gap situated at F point of Brillouin zone of Sm2Zr2O7 for spin up and down polarizations. The detailed analysis of the origin of optical functions like absorption coefficient, dielectric constant, energy loss function; refractive index, reflectivity, extinction coefficient and optical conductivity are explored. The possible ways of change of optical functions are in desirable directions. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) is a new resource-constrained breed and instantiation of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as communicating nodes. These latter follow a predefined path called &rsquo, mission&rsquo, to provide a wide range of applications/services. Without loss of generality, the services and applications offered by the FANET are based on data/content delivery in various forms such as, but not limited to, pictures, video, status, warnings, and so on. Therefore, a content-centric communication mechanism such as Information Centric Networking (ICN) is essential for FANET. ICN addresses the problems of classical TCP/IP-based Internet. To this end, Content-centric networking (CCN), and Named Data Networking (NDN) are two of the most famous and widely-adapted implementations of ICN due to their intrinsic security mechanism and Interest/Data-based communication. To ensure data security, a signature on the contents is appended to each response/data packet in transit. However, trusted communication is of paramount importance and currently lacks in NDN-driven communication. To fill the gaps, in this paper, we propose a novel trust-aware Monitor-based communication architecture for Flying Named Data Networking (FNDN). We first select the monitors based on their trust and stability, which then become responsible for the interest packets dissemination to avoid broadcast storm problem. Once the interest reaches data producer, the data comes back to the requester through the shortest and most trusted path (which is also the same path through which the interest packet arrived at the producer). Simultaneously, the intermediate UAVs choose whether to check the data authenticity or not, following their subjective belief on its producer&rsquo, s behavior and thus-forth reducing the computation complexity and delay. Simulation results show that our proposal can sustain the vanilla NDN security levels exceeding the 80% dishonesty detection ratio while reducing the generated end-to-end delay to less than 1 s in the worst case and reducing the average consumed energy by more than two times.

The restoration of the ancient Silk Road intends to reconnect China with Africa, the Middle East, and Europe through a railway network, airports, roads, seaports, and an optical fiber system. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has three components. One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is based upon two parts of the BRI, the maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road economic belt. OBOR is based upon six economic corridors. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the smartest corridor under OBOR, which passes only through Pakistan, and after completion, will provide a safe and cheap route for China to import oil and energy. CPEC is a multidimensional project under which much infrastructure development initiative has been started to improve the infrastructure and economic development of Pakistan. Infrastructure development is an essential requirement in economic growth, one which further leads to industrialization and is helpful in economic development. The present study was conducted in Pakistan and explored how infrastructure development under the CPEC is useful for the sustainable development of Pakistan, as well as which kind of infrastructure development projects have been included in the CPEC to improve the socio-economic paradigm of Pakistan. A sample of 500 respondents was selected through a multistage sampling technique from the two-node cities. A questionnaire survey was used to collect primary data. The results of the study show that the CPEC is a catalyst for Pakistan to improve its socio-economic conditions and to achieve sustainable development. The participants of the survey agreed that CPEC will improve the socio-economic paradigm of Pakistan and will be helpful in the achievement of sustainable development goals.

During the past two decades, we have witnessed a tremendous development in Vehicular networks, while exploring emerging communication technologies such as vehicular cyber-physical systems (VCPS). Basically, VCPS requires multimodal data from the physical system to take appropriate decision and actions, for example, the congestion warnings, applying brakes, adjusting speed limits, etc. However, there are multiple systems interconnected in the VCPS with different communication capabilities and data communication between those systems that lead us to a challenging task. In this paper, we consider named data networking (NDN) as a promising solution to enhance the reachability of Data among multi-hop VCPS. NDN offers a simple pull-based content communication in the network with multiple interfaces and also supports heterogeneity in terms of communications technologies. The proposed NDN forwarding scheme enables vehicles to send one Interest (request) to collect multiple instances of the Data from different content sources in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can collect information from many nodes that are at longer distance from the information requesting nodes.

Recently nature-inspired optimization algorithms have become a popular choice for solving complex optimization problems. Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) is a nature-inspired new optimization technique, which has successfully applied to solve the constrained optimization and engineering design problems. As a result, the WCA studies have extended significantly in the last 5 years. This review paper provides the comprehensive assessment of WCA in the area of modifications, hybridizations, and applications. Moreover, it will provide the awareness to the researchers how the current algorithm can be modified according to the nature of the problems. The narrative of how WCA was used in the tactics for solving these kinds of problems. Future research directions are also discussed based on the comprehensive conclusion as well as discussion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review article which has enclosed extensive information about the WCA and its applications.

In this article, a secure and verifiable electronic voting scheme is proposed. Encrypted votes are accumulated and prepared in the form of block on each electronic polling booth at the end of polling time. The resultant block from each electronic polling booth is distributed to the authorized nodes of group for temper proof block chaining that assures the internal verifiability. The external verifiability is attained through the redistribution of temper proof Blockchain ledger to the validated and authorized nodes of auditing group. The temper proof property of electoral data is achieved using an emerging Blockchain Technology. Whereas the secure data distribution in the form of temper proof blocks and ledger amongst the authenticated group members is accomplished through the cryptographically secure group oriented scenario. The individual and universal verifiability features in our proposed scheme make the electoral process transparent, reliable and verifiable.

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) comes with intrinsic constraints because it is deployed in the aquatic environment and uses the acoustic signals to communicate. The examples of those constraints are long propagation delay, very limited bandwidth, high energy cost for transmission, very high signal attenuation, costly deployment and battery replacement, and so forth. Therefore, the routing schemes for UASN must take into account those characteristics to achieve energy fairness, avoid energy holes, and improve the network lifetime. The depth based forwarding schemes in literature use node’s depth information to forward data towards the sink. They minimize the data packet duplication by employing the holding time strategy. However, to avoid void holes in the network, they use two hop node proximity information. In this paper, we propose the Energy and Depth variance-based Opportunistic Void avoidance (EDOVE) scheme to gain energy balancing and void avoidance in the network. EDOVE considers not only the depth parameter, but also the normalized residual energy of the one-hop nodes and the normalized depth variance of the second hop neighbors. Hence, it avoids the void regions as well as balances the network energy and increases the network lifetime. The simulation results show that the EDOVE gains more than 15 % packet delivery ratio, propagates 50 % less copies of data packet, consumes less energy, and has more lifetime than the state of the art forwarding schemes.

This chapter describes the recently proposed Future Internet architectures followed by insight and discussion on named data networking (NDN). It also describes the possible applicability of NDN in smart cities and its potentials. To date, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) proposed a promising Future Internet architecture named as CCN. The NDN is providing its part to further enhance CCN project and is funded by the US Future Internet Architecture program. The chapter also summarizes the current advancements in the field of CNN and named data networks that are relevant to the smart cities. CCN claims and focuses on securing the content using public key encryption rather than the connection, which means that it promises that the content is same as it asserts. Finally, the chapter provides variant application scenarios for NDN‐enabled smart cities and future research road map for researchers.

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have been realized as a potential solution for offshore monitoring, undersea military applications, smart fishing, and so on. However, the current communication systems for underwater nodes are facing non-trivial challenges due to the constrained networking conditions. For instance, the sink addresses the node(s) by using their ID(s) to pull the sensed information. However, it is not obvious that the addressed nodes in request message actually are able to provide the requested data. Meanwhile, the Named Data Networking (NDN), aka Content-Centric Networking (CCN), is recently emerged as a potential future Internet architecture. NDN uses the Data Names to pull the required information rather than the IP addresses. In this paper, we check the feasibility of applying NDN into UWSN and name it as UNDN. In addition, we propose the very first naming scheme for UNDN and present the preliminary evaluations.

[EN] Recently, named data networking (NDN) has been proposed as a promising architecture for future Internet technologies. NDN is an extension to the content-centric network (CCN) and is expected to support various applications in vehicular communications [ vehicular NDN (VNDN)]. VNDN basically relies on naming the content rather than using end-to-end device names. In VNDN, a vehicle broadcasts an "Interest" packet for the required "content," regardless of end-to-end connectivity with servers or other vehicles and known as a "consumer." In response, a vehicle with the content replies to the Interest packet with a "Data" packet and named as a "provider." However, the simple VNDN architecture faces several challenges such as consumer/provider mobility and Interest/Data packet(s) forwarding. In VNDN, for the most part, the Data packet is sent along the reverse path of the related Interest packet. However, there is no extensive simulated reference available in the literature to support this argument. In this paper, therefore, we first analyze the propagation behavior of Interest and Data packets in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) environment through extensive simulations. Second, we propose the "CODIE" scheme to control the Data flooding/broadcast storm in the naive VNDN. The main idea is to allow the consumer vehicle to start hop counter in Interest packet. Upon receiving this Interest by any potential provider, a data dissemination limit (DDL) value stores the number of hops and a data packet needs to travel back. Simulation results show that CODIE forwards fewer copies of data packets processed (CDPP) while achieving similar interest satisfaction rate (ISR), as compared with the naive VNDN. In addition, we also found that CODIE also minimizes the overall interest satisfaction delay (ISD), respectively., This work was supported by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, South Korea, under Grant IITP-2015-H8601-15-1002 of the Convergence Information Technology Research Center supervised by the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion. The review of this paper was coordinated by Editors of CVS. (Corresponding author: Dongkyun Kim.)

Recently, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been providing a number of services for on-road users, including video content retrieval using 3G and 4G networks. However, owing to the highly dynamic network topology of VANETs, such services is highly susceptible to poor performance. In such a real-time scenario, a requesting vehicle may not be able to guarantee the video quality using its own wireless interface independently. Thus, motivated to provide a quality video stream, we propose a Fleet Based video Retrieval (FBR) scheme that allows the requesting vehicle to download the H.264/SVC encoded video stream in collaboration with its 1-hop neighbors. The collaborators are selected considering the multiple characteristics of each neighboring vehicle, i.e., 1-hop distance, link duration, velocity, and the available cellular bandwidth. The selected vehicles download the video data using their wireless link and then forward it to the requested vehicle through a Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) protocol. For comparison, we first evaluate our FBR with 3G equipped vehicles and secondly, we designed FBR to work in 4G/LTE environment. Through simulations, we found that FBR has outperformed the recently proposed scheme in terms of receiving video quality and video-flow handling.

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have been providing promising solutions for both the safety and non-safety requirements of 21st century drivers. Since, the number of vehicles are increasing, the current host centric communication approach faces various challenges. On the other hand, the Information Centric Networking (ICN) concept in vehicular communications aims to achieve content retrieval in the dynamic and error prone environment. Recently, the concept Vehicular ICN (VICN), has been explored extensively by researchers, leading to a number of open challenges such as, content naming, name resolution, Interest forwarding strategies, content store, forwarding information base and pending interest table management, security and trust issues, etc. In this paper, we therefore discuss the recent advancements in different VICN approaches with more focus on the Interest forwarding strategies which have been applied during the content retrieval process.

During the past decades, serious efforts have been made to propose various architectures for the future Internet. Each of those architectures has one thing in common, i.e., to focus on content delivery rather than on host-centric approaches. However, only few of them gained popularity due to their possible applications being investigated. In this chapter, we describe the overview of various future Internet architectures such as data-oriented networking architecture, content-centric networking, named-data networking, publish/subscribe, and network of information. The main objective of this chapter is to allow our readers to become familiar with the transformation of these architectures.

Recently, various applications for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have been proposed and smart traffic violation ticketing is one of them. On the other hand, the new Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures have emerged and been investigated into VANETs, such as Vehicular Named Data Networking (VNDN). However, the existing applications in VANETs are not suitable for VNDN paradigm due to the dependency on a“named content”instead of a current“host-centric”approach. Thus, we need to design the emerging and new architectures for VNDN applications. In this paper, we propose a smart traffic violation ticketing (TVT) system for VNDN, named asSmartCop, that enables a cop vehicle (CV) to issue tickets for traffic violation(s) to the offender(s) autonomously, once they are in the transmission range of that CV. The ticket issuing delay, messaging cost, and percentage of violations detected for varying number of vehicles, violators, CVs, and vehicles speeds are estimated through simulations. In addition, we provide a road map of future research directions for enabling safe driving experience in future cars aided with VNDN technology.

Low rate wireless applications are under attraction since last decade. For such applications, IEEE designed a standard known as IEEE 802.15.4. The standard operates at 868, 915 and 2400 MHz with or without using super frame structure. Most of the low rate Wireless PAN applications follow superframe structure. A superframe structure comprises of contention based and contention free periods by offering slotted CSMA/CA and TDMA like operation respectively. This paper analyzes the performance of slotted CSMA/CA algorithm. CSMA/CA algorithm highly depends upon backoff period that is why its impact is analyzed in this work. The performance analysis is based on probability determined by using discrete markov chain model. The performance analysis comprises of nodes waiting time before transmission, channel busy probability and ultimately throughput and reliability is calculated. Results show that network reliability along with throughput of a wireless network increases gradually with the increase in backoff period at the cost of increase in average wait time of nodes.

Several initiatives have been taken in the past decade to improve the architecture and performance of information-centric networks (ICN). In this context, Van Jacobson presented a new architecture called the “content-centric network” (CCN), which was funded by the PARC research company. The main goal of CCN was to change host-centric communication into content-centric communication. In CCN, the requester is known as a “consumer” who sends an “interest” to the network, and any node with the requested data can send back the “content” to the consumer by way of the same path. This simple overview seems superficial without explanation. Therefore, in this chapter, we provide readers with the history of CCN followed by its basic operations. Moreover, we describe the different components of CCN in detail such as the following: (1) What constitutes “content”? (2) What is the structure of content and an interest message? (3) How can the interest can be forwarded and, in response, how can data retrieval be efficient compared with the current Internet architecture? We believe that this chapter will enable our respective readers have a solid background about the CCN and, in later stages, that they can become active researchers in the given field.

Named Data Networking (NDN) has been recently added to the future Internet family. NDN is basically an extension to the Content Centric Network (CCN) and is expected to support various applications. Those applications are to be supported by the future internet architectures. NDN believes in naming the content rather than using end-to-end device names. Recently, NDN has been adapted into Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and hence, we name it Vehicular NDN (VNDN). At it's early stage, VNDN faces several challenges such as consumer/provider mobility, Interest/Data forwarding, content caching and so on. Mostly, VNDN relies on the fact that Data is sent back to the consumer via same path the Interest packet was received from. However, we analyzed that it's not true in a VANET and there is lack of discussion about managing the Data flow back to the consumers in the current literature of VNDN. In this paper, we therefore, pursue to control the data flooding/broadcast storm of the conventional VNDN by proposing our scheme “CONET”. The main idea of CONET is to allow the consumer vehicle to start hop counter in the Interest message and upon receiving that interest by any potential provider, to include Time To Live (TT L) value with data messages. The TT L value includes the number of hops, Data packets should travel on its way back to the consumer. Simulation results show that CONET forwards less Copies of Data Messages Processed (CDMP) while achieving similar Interest Satisfaction Rate (ISR) as the basic VNDN. In addition, CONET also minimizes the overall Interest Satisfaction Delay (ISD), respectively.

Malnutrition in dialysis population is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Nutritional assessment is a neglected area in hemodialysis (HD) patients in developing countries. The aim of the study was to find out whether any traditional parameters have statistically significant correlation with malnutrition. All 58 end-stage renal disease patients on maintenance HD in our dialysis unit were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. The nutritional status was assessed by a predesigned questionnaire including subjective global assessment (SGA). Anthropometric measurements, peripheral neuropathy, and pertinent laboratory parameters were checked. The duration of HD ranged between three months to 10 years (mean 4 ± 1.5 years). Of these 49 patients, 26 (53%) were males with a median age 45 (25–76) years. Fifteen patients (31%) were well nourished and 34 (69%) were undernourished including nine (19%) patients classified as severely malnourished according to SGA. Malnutrition appeared more prevalent in males, however, statistically not significant (P = 0.063). On univariate and multivariate analysis, no significance was found across well-nourished and malnourished patients in terms of age, body mass index, calorie count, duration and frequency of dialysis, dry weight, interdialytic weight loss or gain in the past six months, body fat percentage, serum albumin, blood pressure, intradialytic hypotension, urea reduction ration, Kt/Vurea, peripheral neuropathy, and comorbidities. Psychosocial factors were identified in 24 (49%) patients with 19 (79%) having some degrees of malnutrition, but the finding did not reach the statistical significance. Surprisingly, the traditional factors studied in previous trials have not shown any significant association to malnutrition in our study based on the statistical analysis.

Industrial Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (IUASNs) come with intrinsic challenges like long propagation delay, small bandwidth, large energy consumption, three-dimensional deployment, and high deployment and battery replacement cost. Any routing strategy proposed for IUASN must take into account these constraints. The vector based forwarding schemes in literature forward data packets to sink using holding time and location information of the sender, forwarder, and sink nodes. Holding time suppresses data broadcasts; however, it fails to keep energy and delay fairness in the network. To achieve this, we propose an Energy Scaled and Expanded Vector-Based Forwarding (ESEVBF) scheme. ESEVBF uses the residual energy of the node to scale and vector pipeline distance ratio to expand the holding time. Resulting scaled and expanded holding time of all forwarding nodes has a significant difference to avoid multiple forwarding, which reduces energy consumption and energy balancing in the network. If a node has a minimum holding time among its neighbors, it shrinks the holding time and quickly forwards the data packets upstream. The performance of ESEVBF is analyzed through in network scenario with and without node mobility to ensure its effectiveness. Simulation results show that ESEVBF has low energy consumption, reduces forwarded data copies, and less end-to-end delay.