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In disaster scenarios and high-stakes rescue operations, integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as fog nodes has become crucial. This integration ensures a smooth connection between affected populations and essential health monitoring devices, supported by the Internet of Things (IoT). Integrating UAVs in such environments is inherently challenging, where the primary objectives involve maximizing network connectivity and coverage while extending the network's lifetime through energy-efficient strategies to serve the maximum number of affected individuals. In this paper, We propose a novel model centred around dynamic UAV-based fog deployment that optimizes the system's adaptability and operational efficacy within the afflicted areas. First, we decomposed the problem into two subproblems. Connectivity and coverage subproblem, and network lifespan optimization subproblem. We shape our UAV fog deployment problem as a uni-objective optimization and introduce a specialized UAV fog deployment algorithm tailored specifically for UAV fog nodes deployed in rescue missions. While the network lifespan optimization subproblem is efficiently solved via a one-dimensional swapping method. Following that, We introduce a novel optimization strategy for UAV fog node placement in dynamic networks during evacuation scenarios, with a primary focus on ensuring robust connectivity and maximal coverage for mobile users, while extending the network's lifespan. Finally, we introduce Adaptive Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) for fog node deployment in a dynamic network. Its agility, rapid convergence, and low computational demands make it an ideal fit for high-pressure environments.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) enables interconnected smart devices to share data and services, opening up opportunities for personalized service recommendations. However, existing research often overlooks crucial aspects that can enhance the accuracy and relevance of recommendations in the SIoT context. Specifically, existing techniques tend to consider the extraction of social relationships between devices and neglect the contextual presentation of service reviews. This study aims to address these gaps by exploring the contextual representation of each device-service pair. Firstly, we propose a latent features combination technique that can capture latent feature interactions, by aggregating the device-device relationships within the SIoT. Then, we leverage Factorization Machines to model higher-order feature interactions specific to each SIoT device-service pair to accomplish accurate rating prediction. Finally, we propose a service recommendation framework for SIoT based on review aggregation and feature learning processes. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in improving service recommendation accuracy and relevance.

Wearable devices like smart glasses have gained popularity across various applications. However, their limited computational capabilities pose challenges for tasks that require extensive processing, such as image and video processing, leading to drained device batteries. To address this, offloading such tasks to nearby powerful remote devices, such as mobile devices or remote servers, has emerged as a promising solution. This paper focuses on analyzing task-offloading scenarios for a healthcare monitoring application performed on smart wearable glasses, aiming to identify the optimal conditions for offloading. The study evaluates performance metrics including task completion time, computing capabilities, and energy consumption under realistic conditions. A specific use case is explored within an indoor area like an airport, where security agents wearing smart glasses to detect elevated body temperature in individuals, potentially indicating COVID-19. The findings highlight the potential benefits of task offloading for wearable devices in healthcare settings, demonstrating its practicality and relevance.

Managing the explosion of data from the edge to the cloud requires intelligent supervision such as fog node deployments, which is an essential task to assess network operability. To ensure network operability, the deployment process must be carried out effectively in terms of two main factors: connectivity and coverage. The network connectivity is based on fog node deployment which determines the physical topology of the network while the coverage determines the network accessibility. Both have a significant impact on network performance and guarantee the network QoS. Determining an optimum fog node deployment method that minimizes cost, reduces computation and communication overhead, and provides a high degree of network connection coverage is extremely hard. Therefore, maximizing coverage as well as preserving network connectivity is a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we proposed a fog deployment algorithm that can effectively connect the fog nodes and cover all edge devices. Firstly, we formulate fog deployment as an instance of multi-objective optimization problems with a large search space. Then, we leverage Marine Predator Algorithm (MPA) to tackle the deployment problem and prove that MPA is well-suited for fog node deployment due to its rapid convergence and low computational complexity compared to other population-based algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithm on a different benchmark of generated instances with various fog scenario configurations. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is capable of providing very promising results when compared to state-of-the-art methods for determining an optimal deployment of fog nodes., Comment: Cluster Comput (2024)

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential integration with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises to seamlessly integrate into smart transportation systems. However, the key characteristics of IoV, such as high-speed mobility and frequent disconnections make it difficult to manage its security and privacy. The Blockchain, as a distributed tamper-resistant ledge, has been proposed as an innovative solution that guarantees privacy-preserving yet secure schemes. In this paper, we review recent literature on the application of blockchain to IoV, in particular, and intelligent transportation systems in general.

A trust management system (TMS) is an integral component of any IoT network. A reliable trust management system must guarantee the network security, data integrity, and act as a referee that promotes legitimate devices, and punishes any malicious activities. Trust scores assigned by TMSs reflect devices' reputations, which can help predict the future behaviours of network entities and subsequently judge the reliability of different network entities in IoT networks. Many TMSs have been proposed in the literature, these systems are designed for small-scale trust attacks, and can deal with attacks where a malicious device tries to undermine TMS by spreading fake trust reports. However, these systems are prone to large-scale trust attacks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a TMS for large-scale IoT systems called Trust2Vec, which can manage trust relationships in large-scale IoT systems and can mitigate large-scale trust attacks that are performed by hundreds of malicious devices. Trust2Vec leverages a random-walk network exploration algorithm that navigates the trust relationship among devices and computes trust network embeddings, which enables it to analyze the latent network structure of trust relationships, even if there is no direct trust rating between two malicious devices. To detect large-scale attacks, suck as self-promoting and bad-mouthing, we propose a network embeddings community detection algorithm that detects and blocks communities of malicious nodes. The effectiveness of Trust2Vec is validated through large-scale IoT network simulation. The results show that Trust2Vec can achieve up to 94\% mitigation rate in various network scenarios., Comment: \c{opyright} 20XX IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

The Metaverse is a virtual environment where users are represented by avatars to navigate a virtual world, which has strong links with the physical one. State-of-the-art Metaverse architectures rely on a cloud-based approach for avatar physics emulation and graphics rendering computation. Such centralized design is unfavorable as it suffers from several drawbacks caused by the long latency required for cloud access, such as low quality visualization. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose a Fog-Edge hybrid computing architecture for Metaverse applications that leverage an edge-enabled distributed computing paradigm, which makes use of edge devices computing power to fulfil the required computational cost for heavy tasks such as collision detection in virtual universe and computation of 3D physics in virtual simulation. The computational cost related to an entity in the Metaverse such as collision detection or physics emulation are performed at the end-device of the associated physical entity. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we simulate a distributed social metaverse application. Simulation results shows that the proposed architecture can reduce the latency by 50% when compared with the legacy cloud-based Metaverse applications., Comment: Submitted to IEEE IoTJ

Vehicular social networking is an emerging application of the promising Internet of Vehicles (IoV) which aims to achieve the seamless integration of vehicular networks and social networks. However, the unique characteristics of vehicular networks such as high mobility and frequent communication interruptions make content delivery to end-users under strict delay constrains an extremely challenging task. In this paper, we propose a social-aware vehicular edge computing architecture that solves the content delivery problem by using some of the vehicles in the network as edge servers that can store and stream popular content to close-by end-users. The proposed architecture includes three components. First, we propose a social-aware graph pruning search algorithm that computes and assigns the vehicles to the shortest path with the most relevant vehicular content providers. Secondly, we use a traffic-aware content recommendation scheme to recommend relevant content according to their social context. This scheme uses graph embeddings in which the vehicles are represented by a set of low-dimension vectors (vehicle2vec) to store information about previously consumed content. Finally, we propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) method to optimize the content provider vehicles distribution across the network. The results obtained from a realistic traffic simulation show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system when compared to the state-of-the-art baselines., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible

With the recent advances of the Internet of Things, and the increasing accessibility of ubiquitous computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social interactions in general, causing a quick proliferation of social relationships among IoT entities. The increasing number of these relationships and their heterogeneous social features have led to computing and communication bottlenecks that prevent the IoT network from taking advantage of these relationships to improve the offered services and customize the delivered content, known as relationship explosion. On the other hand, the quick advances in artificial intelligence applications in social computing have led to the emerging of a promising research field known as Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) that has the potential to tackle the social relationship explosion problem. This paper discusses the role of IoT in social relationships detection and management, the problem of social relationships explosion in IoT and reviews the proposed solutions using ASI, including social-oriented machine-learning and deep-learning techniques., Comment: IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2021)