Search

Every nation has social aims which are belongs to their ideology. Education is one of the powerful source by which the real concept of ideology can be determined. This paper discusses the importance and need of the implementation and awareness of higher education in northern areas of Pakistan in order to bring attention from government sector to raise the budget and take economic measures to build educational institutions at graduate and post graduate level in order to globalize with the communities. The overall strategy of this study is quantitative and survey based. A total of 250 teachers were selected from 10 educational institutions of northern areas out of whole by random sampling. For data collection, a structured questionnaire based on “Likert Scale” containing 20 items served as the instrument of the study. Five hypotheses were made to evaluate results. The collected data were analyzed quantitatively using Correlation, Regression and Anova to explore the nonexistence economic condition of northern educational system. Results and findings suggested that the educational system of northern areas strongly need the surety of developed universities, sound economic opportunities and awareness regarding gender discrimination, skilled and trained instructors and administration, technological advancement to promote higher education system in northern areas of Pakistan.

Objective: To determine the frequency of haemophilus influenzae infection in children less than 5 years with acute bacterial meningitis (ABM). Study Design: Descriptive Cross Sectional study. Setting: Department of Pediatric Medicine, The Children’s Hospital and Institute of Child Health, Multan. Period: October 2019 to March 2020. Material & Methods: A total of 165 children aged 5 – 60 months of either gender having acute bacterial meningitis with duration of < 2 weeks were enrolled. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of each child was sent for microbiological analysis. Results: There were 106 (64.2 %) boys and 59 (35.8 %) girls. Mean age was 2.72 ± 1.07 years. Most cases, 112 (67.9 %) belonged to urban areas. Maternal literacy was positive in 65 (39.4%) cases while 59 (35.8%) were fully vaccinated. Mean disease duration was 56.25 ± 15.36 hours and 112 (67.9%) had duration of illness more than 36 hours. Frequency of Haemophilus Influenzae was noted in 35 (21.2%) cases. Conclusion: Frequency of Haemophilus Influenzae was high among children with acute bacterial meningitis. Early diagnosis and appropriate management might help reducing prolonged hospitalization and disease morbidity related to Haemophilus Influenza.

Objective: The aim behind this study was to determine the frequency of visual field and visual acuity disturbances before resection and improvement after resection of pituitary tumors in patients. Study Design: Observational study. Setting: Neurosurgery Department of Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center, Karachi. Period: August 2015 to August 2016. Material & Methods: A total of 30 patients presented with headache and visual deterioration and diagnosed as pituitary adenoma at neurosurgery OPD, ward and ER were included through a consecutive purposive sampling technique. The detailed visual and ocular analysis (visual acuity, visual field, and extra ocular movements) carried out at time of admission and postoperatively. Tumor was removed by consultant neurosurgeon through trans-sphenoidal approach. SPSS version 17.0 was used to analyze the collected data. Results: A total of 30 cases of pituitary adenoma were included. The average age of the patients was 34.5 ± 10.8 years and among them 17 (56.7%) were males and 13 (43.3%) were females. Pre-operative assessment of the mean deviation of visual function was -8.21 ± 6.10 dB which is significantly improved to -4.6 ± 3.9 dB post-operatively (P < 0.0001). While pre-operative Visual Acuity (logMAR) was 0.3 ± 0.26 and post-operative 0.21 ± 0.2 (P

Objective: To find out different species of plasmodium (P. falciparum and P. vivax) involved in children with malaria at a tertiary childcare hospital. Study Design: Descriptive, Cross-sectional study. Setting: Department of Paediatric Medicine, The Children’s Hospital and Institute of Child Health, Multan. Period: October 2019 to March 2020. Material & Methods: A total of 281 cases of either gender, aged 1 to 12 years and patients with malaria were enrolled. A special template was designed to record study information. Venous blood as five ml sample was drawn and dispatched to institutional laboratory for ICT malaria, complete blood count and giemsa stain smear and observed under light microscope. Data analysis was performed employing SPSS version 24.0. Results: Out of a total of 281 cases, 177 (63.0%) were male ande 104 (37.0%) female. Mean age of study participants was 4.29±2.48 years. A total of 135 (48.0%) children belonged to rural areas and 197 (70.1%) had monthly family income < 25000 rupees. Mean duration of illness was 4.21 ± 2.12 days. Previous history of use of anti-malarial drugs was noted in 62 (22.1%) of our study cases. Plasmodium falciparum was observed in 52 (18.5%) cases and plasmodium vivax in 229 (81.5%). Conclusion: Plasmodium vivax is predominantly more prevalent in our population as compared with plasmodium falciparum in children with malaria. Plasmodium falciparum and plasmodium vivax were significantly linked with age and disease duration. Malaria was noted to be more prevalent among poor families living in slum areas having inadequate sanitation facilities.

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.

Purpose of the study: This article aims to examine the economic consequences of the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19 across Pakistan's sectors. To date, the second phase of COVID-19 is underway, and the economic losses of the industries and the recovery plan are still underdeveloped. Methodology: This study is qualitative based. Mix method and desk review approaches are used to analyse the impact of covid-19 on the different sectors of Pakistan Main Findings: The review revealed that the pandemic had a range of negative impacts on domestic, foreign trade, health care, education, and tourism, but had a positive effect on the environment and the agriculture sector. Applications of this study: This study can be effective for the researcher to an immediate need to study each sector's economic insights further to improve crisis management policy. Novelty/Originality of this study: this research contributes to the covid-19 pandemic in the different sectors of Pakistan. It also offers insights into how policymakers should build policies.

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.

Background Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) is an uncommon cause of stroke in humans and the mainstay of treatment is anticoagulation unless contraindicated. Non-vitamin K oral anticoagulants have not been duly evaluated in randomized controlled trials in CVT. Objective To compare the efficacy and safety of oral rivaroxaban with vitamin K anticoagulant (warfarin) in preventing recurrent venous thromboembolism (VTE) in patients with CVT. Methods Adult patients with CVT, who were stable after 5–12 days of treatment with parenteral heparin 1 mg/kg, were screened for eligibility. The patients were randomly divided into two groups to receive oral rivaroxaban 20–30 mg daily or warfarin 1, 3 or 5 mg daily (with the dose adjusted to maintain an INR of 2–3), for 3–12 months. Recanalization rates, periprocedural complications, and clinical outcomes were assessed by Magnetic Resonance Venography (MRV) and National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) at 3rd, 6th and 12th month follow-ups. Results In total, 45 patients with CVT were randomized to the two treatment groups (21 to rivaroxaban and 24 to warfarin). Overall recanalization was achieved by 18 (86%) and 20 (83%) cases from rivaroxaban and warfarin group, respectively at 6th month follow-up; and by all 45 (100%) cases from the both groups at 12th month follow-up. Excellent outcome (NIHSS score 0) was obtained by 20 (95%) cases from rivaroxaban group at 3rd to 12th month follow-ups; and by 23 (96%) cases at 6th to 12th month follow-ups. There were no major bleeding events during the trial. None of the patients developed recurrence of thrombosis. Statistically, no significant difference between the two treatment groups in terms of recanalization and clinical outcomes could be observed. Conclusion Rivaroxaban is a safe option in CVT however; larger randomized controlled studies will impact the results validity.

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.

Nuzhat Sial,1 Saba Saeed,2 Mukhtiar Ahmad,3 Yasir Hameed,3 Abdul Rehman,4 Mustansar Abbas,5 Rizwan Asif,6 Hamad Ahmed,5 Muhammad Safdar Hussain,3 Jalil Ur Rehman,7 Muhammad Atif,7 Muhammad Rashid Khan8 1Department of Zoology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan; 2Department of Zoology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan; 3Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan; 4Department of Eastern Medicine, Qarshi University, Lahore, Pakistan; 5Department of Eastern Medicine, Government College University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan; 6Department of Microbiology, Government College University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan; 7University College of Conventional Medicine, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Pakistan; 8University College of Eastern Medicine, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, PakistanCorrespondence: Yasir HameedDepartment of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, 63100, PakistanEmail Yasirhameed2011@gmail.comIntroduction: Cancer is one of the most common malignancies and the leading cause of death worldwide. As a member of the transmembrane emp24 domain (Tmed)/p24 family of proteins, TMED2 expression variations have been documented earlier in only a few subtypes of human cancers, and the multi-omics profiling of TMED2 as a shared biomarker in different other subtypes of human cancers remains to be uncovered.Methods: In the current study, TMED2 multi-omics analysis in 24 major subtypes of human cancer was performed using different authentic online databases and bioinformatics analysis including UALCAN, Kaplan–Meier (KM) plotter, Human Protein Atlas (HPA), GENT2, MEXPRESS, cBioportal, STRING, DAVID, TIMER, and CTD.Results: In general, the TMED2 expression in 24 major subtypes of human cancers was higher relative to normal controls and was also strongly associated with the lower overall survival (OS) and relapse-free survival (RFS) duration of CESC, ESCA, HNSC, KIRC, LIHC, and LUAD patients. This implies that TMED2 plays a significant role in the development and progression of these cancers. Furthermore, the TMED2 overexpression was also correlated with different clinicopathological features of CESC, ESCA, HNSC, KIRC, LIHC, and LUAD patients. TMED2-associated genes network was involved in 3 diverse pathways, and finally, few stronger correlations were also explored between TMED2 expression and its promoter methylation level, genetic alterations, and CD8+ T immune cells level.Conclusion: In conclusion, via this in silico study, we have elucidated that TMED2 can serve as a shared diagnostic and prognostic biomarker in CESC, ESCA, HNSC, KIRC, LIHC, and LUAD patients of different clinicopathological features but, further in vitro and in vivo research should be carried out to confirm these findings.Keywords: TMED2, cancer, expression variations, biomarker

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.

Hypertension has become a major risk factor for many diseases, including cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and kidney disorders. It has been reported that the composition of human gut microbiota is changed during the progression of cardiovascular and kidney diseases. The current study aimed to qualitatively and quantitatively compare the composition of gut microbiota between patients with hypertension and healthy controls. Fecal samples were collected from 50 patients diagnosed with grade 3 hypertension and 30 healthy controls. Touchdown PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis with primers specifically targeting the V3 region of 16S ribosomal RNA, and quantitative PCR, were performed to characterize all the samples. High-throughput sequencing of the V3-V4 regions was performed on 30 randomly selected samples. By comparing diversity and richness indices, the gut microbiome of the hypertensive individuals was found to be more diverse than that of the healthy controls. Among the main bacterial phlya that reside in the gut, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria were dominant in all the samples; however the Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes ratio was variable, with a significant increase in the patients with hypertension compared with the healthy control group. In addition, at the genus level, there was an increased abundance of Prevotella_9, Megasphaera, Parasutterella and Escherichia-Shigella in patients with hypertension, while Bacteroides and Faecalibacterium were decreased. These results suggested that the human gut microbiota is altered in hypertension, and understanding the mechanism of these changes in microbial composition may open up new insights, and help to treat hypertension and other related diseases.

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.

Free and fair elections are indispensable to quantify the sentiments of the populace for forming the government of representatives in democratic countries. Due to its procedural variation from country to country and complexity, to maneuverer, it is a challenging task. Since the Orthodox paper-based electoral systems are slow and error-prone, therefore, a secure and efficient electoral system always remained a key area of research. Although a lot of literature is available on this topic. However, due to reported anomalies and weaknesses in American and France election in 2016, it once again has become a pivotal subject of research. In this article, we proposed a new secure and efficient electronic voting scheme based on public key cryptosystem dubbed as Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU). Furthermore, an efficient and robust three factors authentication protocol based on a personalized memorable password, a smartcard, and bioHash is proposed to validate the legitimacy of a voter for casting a legal vote. NTRU based blind signatures are used to preserve the anonymity and privacy of vote and voters, whereas the proficiency of secure and efficient counting of votes is achieved through NTRU based homomorphic tally. Non-coercibility and individual verifiability are attained through Mark Pledge scheme. The proposed applied electronic voting scheme is, secure, transparent and efficient for large scale elections.

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.

Social networking sites (SNS) are a growing marketing tool used in advertisement and marketing activities. Companies have invested a lot in the fields of social media advertising through SNS. Yet, the challenge companies face is how they can efficiently advertise their social media advertisements and increase customer purchase intention. This study aims to explore and verify key interaction elements within SNS communities that are associated with purchase intention. This study includes predictors, such as emotional value and informativeness, privacy concerns, advertising value, community commitment, community satisfaction to predict consumer purchase intention. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to a sample of 480 social media users. Results reveal that SNS predictors positively impact purchase intentions. Interestingly, results show partial mediation of community commitment and community satisfaction on the relationship between SNS interaction factors and purchase intention and no mediation of advertising value between informativeness and purchase intention.

The linguistic developments have always been coincideing with the development of human civilizations. It is, therefore, commonly believed among historians and linguistic scholars that language and its various generes are the museum of any civilization that help understand depth and breadth of its development over time. The historical development of Saraiki language over time also has been reflected into its various geners such as poetry, drama, prose, folklores or nonfiction, and media. The present study has examined the the historical development of literary genre, novel in modern Saraiki literature and its sociocultural and linguistic implications. The study would help researcg scholars in the area of Saraiki literature and linguistics to gain deeper understanding of historical development of Saraiki novel in relation to other generes and look into its relationship with sociocultural development of people in Saraiki speaking areas.

Named Data Networking (NDN) uses the content name to enable content sharing in a network using Interest and Data messages. In essence, NDN supports communication through multiple interfaces, therefore, it is imperative to think of the interface that better meets the communication requirements of the application. The current interface ranking is based on single static metric such as minimum number of hops, maximum satisfaction rate, or minimum network delay. However, this ranking may adversely affect the network performance. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a new multi-metric robust interface ranking scheme that combines multiple metrics with different objective functions. Furthermore, we also introduce different forwarding modes to handle the forwarding decision according to the available ranked interfaces. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme selects the best and suitable forwarding interface to deliver content.

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has become significantly important in online communities, which are influential sources of instant information on the internet. This study examines the eWOM input attributes linked to consumers’ information adoption behavior in the context of information-related interaction. This study uses a structural equation modeling approach by choosing participants from Fujian and Guangdong provinces of China. The results reveal that eWOM input attributes studied positively influence information-related interactions. An individual’s perception of value enhances the performance of products or services, which is an essential predictor of information adoption. Furthermore, information usefulness and related interactions are key eWOM message characteristics affecting information adoption on the internet. This study contributes to the eWOM input attributes and message characteristics literature by exploring information-related interaction as a new mediator to consumers’ online information adoption. The authors provide suggestions for marketers and firms to dynamically develop strategies in response to consumers’ concerns while making a purchase online.

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.

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.

Undescended testis is a very common presentation in male paediatric population but testis at ectopic sites is a very rare pathology. One of the ectopic sites is perineum and it accounts for only 1% of all cases of undescended testis. We report a case of an 11yr old boy who presented with an empty left hemiscrotum and detailed examination revealed a soft tissue mass on the corresponding side in the perineum. Surgical exploration was carried out during which it was revealed that mass was actually testis at ectopic site with adequate length of the spermatic cord. Testis was mobilized and fixed in the ipsilateral hemiscrotum.

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.

Wireless communications and networking have been continually evolving to improve and be a part of our lifestyle. This uninterrupted development is due to many research projects and practices that are being carried out to improve the quality of services and applications supported by networking technologies. Initially, the plethora of computer networks research was designed to allow users to share the thoughts and facts using textual data through addressing devices. Meanwhile, we have witnessed that users play the role of both producers and consumers at the same time. These new emerging requirements gave birth to Cloud Computing (CC), Data Centric Networking (DCN), and other advancements in IEEE standards. Moreover, researchers also intended to redesign the networking architectures and protocols with the focus on content rather than the host. The resulting new architectures are Information Centric Networks (ICN) with various extensions like Content Centric Networks (CCN), Named Data Networks (NDN), Data-Oriented Network Architecture, etc.

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.

Empowerment of wheat genotypes by application of growth regulators, compatible solutes and plant extracts under water restriction is an important strategy for getting sustainable yield. Field trail was performed at the research area of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Ghazi University, Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan. Three wheat cultivars Aas-2011, Faisalabad- 2008 and Triple dwarf-1 were subjected to drought stress (skipping the irrigation at grain filling stage). The wheat genotypes were subjected to treatments viz., T1 i.e. All normal irrigation without application of abscisic acid (ABA), salicylic acid (SA), moringa (MLE) and mulberry leaf water extract (MBLE), T2­ i.e. skipping the irrigation at grain filling stage and application of 2µM ABA, T3 i.e. skipping the irrigation at grain filling stage and application of 10 m mol SA, T4 i.e. skipping the irrigation at grain filling stage and application of 15% MLE and T5 i.e. skipping the irrigation at grain filling stage and application of 10% MBLE. The experiment was laid out in Randomized Complete Block Design with factorial arrangement and repeated three times. From this study it is concluded that Aas-2011 shown best result under drought condition by applying growth regulators and plant water extracts. rs and plant water extracts. O fortalecimento de genótipos de trigo pela aplicação de reguladores de crescimento, solutos compatíveis e extratos vegetais sob restrição hídrica é uma importante estratégia para obtenção de produção sustentável. Trilha de campo foi realizada na área de pesquisa da Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias, Universidade de Ghazi, Dera Ghazi Khan, Paquistão. Três cultivares de trigo Aas-2011, Faisalabad-2008 e Triple anão-1 foram submetidas a estresse hídrico (pulando a irrigação no estágio de enchimento de grãos). Os genótipos de trigo foram submetidos a tratamentos, T1, ou seja, irrigação normal sem aplicação de ácido abscísico (ABA), ácido salicílico (SA), moringa (MLE) e extrato de água de amoreira (MBLE), T2¬, pular a irrigação em estágio de enchimento de grãos e aplicação de ABA 2µM, T3 ou seja, ignorando a irrigação no estágio de enchimento de grãos e aplicação de 10 m mol SA, T4 ou seja, ignorando a irrigação no estágio de enchimento de grãos e aplicação de 15% MLE e T5 ou seja, ignorando a irrigação no enchimento de grãos estágio e aplicação de 10% MBLE. O experimento foi exposto no delineamento de blocos completos casualizados com arranjo fatorial e repetido três vezes. A partir deste estudo conclui-se que Aas-2011 apresentou melhor resultado sob condição de seca, aplicando reguladores de crescimento e extratos de água de plantas.

E-commerce offers an opportunity on web renounced in internet marketing, and the consumers' communication behavior has changed, which has taken the place of word of mouth (WOM). This study investigated consumers' motivational involvement in electronic word of mouth for online information adoption mediated by writers, motivations. Using a sample of 390 active Chinese internet users, it revealed that social tie and perceived risk are essential factors that influence consumers' behavior, occur unpleasant consequences, and the possibility of uncertainties during the decision making process. Online retailers should emphasize perceived risk mitigation enable to provide a quick response on the websites. Practitioners need to understand consumer behavior in the online shopping system for the expansion of the online marketplace to product varieties, online advertising, retail strategies, and market segmentation. Organizations should train their service provides to timely response, concentrate on monitoring the aspects of consumers' reviews, on creating choices among groups and individuals, which can improve the organization's business performance.

The Microservice architecture is a design inspired by service oriented system that has recently gaining popularity and that promises to change the way in which software is design, developed and deployed. In this paper we will show comparative analysis of SOA and Microservice oriented architecture with its complete paradigms. Now a day’s business applications have common requirement to deal with large amount of data within a minimum amount of time by end user especially market is high for hand held devices therefore software design should be highly scalable, secure and have minimum amount of response time. In this paper We examine the cost, performance and scalability for this purpose two techniques are simulated first is based on SOA or monolithic and second is high grain Microservice architecture implemented on our business application which is Services trade link using for public to post their home maintenance jobs and can search different services and service providers for avail their services to make work easy and quick in their busy life in different category as per requirement and services provider also register their business in different category and can search their relevant business over this application so we are expecting huge traffic and lot of data on this application that’s why we need to select correct architecture for this purpose also we are focusing mobile user as well.

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.

Content-Centric Network (CCN) is a promising future Internet architecture, attracting research community and being widely adopted in the vehicular networks. The main concept of CCN is to smoothly distribute digital contents between the content provider and consumer. In these types of networks, contents are identified by unique names, however, naming those contents is still a challenging task. Therefore, we propose a hierarchical and hash based naming with efficient Compact Trie (CT) management scheme for Vehicular Content-Centric Network (VCCN). The proposed naming scheme makes the best use of the features offered by hierarchical as well as hash-based or flat naming schemes. The hierarchical part of the digital content name contains information about the content provider, type, its sub-types and attributes of the content itself that is shared between vehicles. The hash part uniquely identifies the digital content required for VCCN applications. The proposed naming scheme satisfies two main purposes: first, it helps in minimizing the routing table by aggregating the name prefixes and simplifying the routing decisions. Second, it contains attributes, spatial, temporal and their range information to easily find and resolve the content. The proposed scheme manages prefixes (e.g. Add, Search and Delete) in the tables e.g. Forwarding Information Base (FIB), Pending Interest Table (PIT), etc. The CT is relatively faster and space-efficient than Simple Trie and has better performance compared to the existing solutions of naming the required content(s). The evaluation results show that the proposed CT based prefix management scheme performs 45.5% and 23.3% faster prefix search and 55% and 34% faster prefix delete operation compared to Simple Trie and Bloom-Filter based name management schemes, respectively. The memory profile results show that average memory consumption of the proposed CT implementation is 24 and 186 times smaller than the Simple Trie and the NLAPB, respectively.

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.

Low rate and low processing wireless applications are under high demands since last decade. Most of these applications use IEEE 802.15.4 standard on their physical and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers. The standard operates in 868MHz, 915MHz, and 2400MHz frequency bands, and offers superframe structure in its beacon enabled modes. This superframe structure comprises of Contention Access Period (CAP) and Contention Free Periods (CFP). During CFP, nodes are allocated Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) to transfer their data. In this work, CFP slots of superframe structure have been fine-tuned for better link utilization. A knapsack optimization algorithm is designed to accommodate more CFP requesting nodes. The proposed scheme improves the link utilization and accommodates more nodes as compared to the existing standard. The analytical results show that our proposed work improves the link utilization almost 50% and allows up to double of nodes as compared to the standard on all three frequency bands.

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.