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Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the most trending topics in the present world. It has numerous benefits and its potentiality is unfolding gradually. The implementation of IIoT in mission and safety-critical systems has shown its significance. Since it deals with important and sensitive information, an extensive study is required to address the susceptibility of it towards security issues. Therefore, there have been many proposals to use certificateless signature scheme, machine learning approaches, public key encryption as well as blockchain to improve the security of IIoT. It is important to note that blockchain is playing a significant role in the IIoT technology where the important characteristics of blockchain, immutability, decentralization, tamper-proof, have made a profound impact on the security vulnerabilities of IIoT. Taking this into account, this paper proposes a permissioned blockchain for IIoT that addresses and guarantees to ensure and improve the security vulnerabilities and susceptibility of IIoT towards cyber threats. The permissioned blockchain enabled IIoT ensures a secure medium for device communication, data sharing, and access control. This paper also discusses the security issues of IIoT and presents a comprehensive analysis of some of the proposed blockchain based solutions to improve IIoT security challenges. It addresses the benefits of a permissioned blockchain enabled IIoT over a public blockchain as well as presents a future direction for the upcoming integration of blockchain with IIoT and other industries.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) allow us to manipulate objects in the physical world by providing a communication bridge between computation and actuation elements. In the current scheme of things, this sought-after control is marred by limitations inherent in the underlying communication network(s) as well as by the uncertainty found in the physical world. These limitations hamper fine-grained control of elements that may be separated by large-scale distances. In this regard, soft computing is an emerging paradigm that can help to overcome the vulnerabilities, and unreliability of CPS by using techniques including fuzzy systems, neural network, evolutionary computation, probabilistic reasoning and rough sets. In this paper, we present a comprehensive contemporary review of soft computing techniques for CPS dependability modeling, analysis, and improvement. This paper provides an overview of CPS applications, explores the foundations of dependability engineering, and highlights the potential role of soft computing techniques for CPS dependability with various case studies, while identifying common pitfalls and future directions. In addition, this paper provides a comprehensive survey on the use of various soft computing techniques for making CPS dependable., IEEE Access

Technology has become an integral part of our life. One of the most emerging technologies of the 21st century is blockchain. It is a revolution for the digital world as it brings a new perspective of security, efficiency, and productivity of different frameworks. It works as a distributed database that is shared among a decentralized network of computers. It stores information about the transaction that is made with cryptocurrency and is maintained with the help of different computers which are linked in a peer-to-peer network. No single user can control the transactions, but everyone can inspect it. The information about the transactions is assembled as a “block” and these blocks are linked with each other as a “chain”. That’s why it is called blockchain. The information inside blocks is immutable. The technology of blockchain is so efficient that it is not only used in securing financial information but also in credit history, real estate, public transport, music streaming, healthcare and so forth. According to Don and Alex Tapscott (2016), blockchain records not just financial transactions but virtually everything valuable. Currently, there is a wide spectrum of blockchain applications. The purpose of the research paper is to discuss some of the utilization of blockchain and they are Cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), Fintech, Cloud Storage, Media, Travel, and Education. Furthermore, this paper examines both aspects, advantages, and disadvantages, of the blockchain. Finally, it identifies the problem areas of the technology that can be studied further to increase the effectiveness of blockchain.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the new technology that will change the Internet era in the coming years. IoT can be used in many fields, such as digitally connected factories, facility management, production flow management inventory management, safety, security, health care, logistics, supply chain optimization, and so on. However, due to limited capabilities in IoT, it is impractical to implement extensive security solutions. Also, security standards for IoT are not mature enough. As a result, many security incidents affect IoT reliability. In this paper, we propose an effective security mechanisms that can be implemented to ensure data accuracy and integrity of IoT devices along with considering its limited hardware resources. We implement Blockchain in IoT to enhance IoT security. We apply our approach using the Ethereum protocol by having multiple Raspberry Pi devices connected as peers to the Blockchain. Also, we discuss the implementation and the expected outcome of this project, which is to implement the Access Control List mechanism using Blockchain to improve the overall IoT security and to connect IoT devices to Ethereum as light nodes.

Modern wireless communication technologies enabled high data rate support which stands in need of proficient MAC protocols. In WLANs, the fair channel access and collision avoidance are achieved by employing contention. The contention period degrades bandwidth utilization and longer delays; the network performance worsens for high data rates. Previously, this problem is addressed by modifying or adaptively selecting contention time using the same time-domain- based backoff mechanism. In this paper, we propose a backoff scheme, FD-Backoff, in which backoff is taken in the frequency domain. Therein, an integer is assigned to every data subcarrier, and then, a random data subcarrier (integer) is chosen to transmit a RTS packet. Since OFDM-based data subcarriers are orthogonal, thus simultaneous transmission of multiple RTS packets is possible. Every nontransmitter node listens on the whole channel bandwidth to observe any active subcarriers. The transmitter who chose smallest subcarrier for RTS transmission wins channel access and receiver replies it with a CTS packet. Contrary to the IEEE 802.11 backoff mechanism, the proposed backoff scheme offers lesser and relatively fixed contention overhead. Performance analysis based on analytical and simulation study suggests that the proposed scheme promises lower contention overhead and higher efficiency gain (up to 35 %) as compared to standard channel access mechanism.

Background: Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has emerged as a public health issue globally and especially in developing countries. An adequate and baseline epidemiological information on MDR-TB is critical for effective control and prevention of MDR TB. Objective: To evaluate the risk factors for developing MDR-TB among the patients registered under TB-DOTS at Federal General Hospital (FGH) Islamabad. Results: Among total of 27 cases 14 (51%) were male. The mean age of the cases was 31 years (range13-61 years). Most of the cases belonged to age group 20-30 years n=11 (40.7%). On bivariate analysis, out of a total of 27 cases, 07 were found to have defaulted from TB treatment, (OR 6.71, CI 1.7-25), 12 had a contact with MDR TB patient (OR 5.6, CI 2-15), 22 had a poor socio-economic status (OR 3.1, CI 1.1-9.2) and 14 had poor knowledge about MDR-TB (OR 2.8, CI 1.1-7.4). Conclusions: ATT failure, contact with MDR-TB patient, poor knowledge about MDR-TB were found to be associated with having MDR-TB. Awareness campaigns at an institutional and patient levels was recommended. On recommendations of this study awareness campaign was started in FGH regarding significant risk factors for MDR-TB.

The integration of heterogeneous wireless access technologies has numerous issues for multimedia applications, such as to smoothly continue over new connections without any service disruption during vertical handovers. We propose State-Aware Feedback extension to Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) that meets QoS requirements of multimedia applications throughout the handover process. We consider movement of mobile subscribers among heterogeneous access technologies from highly unstable to more stable environment and model their mobility patterns as Uniform, Pareto, and Exponentially distributed. We present detailed analysis on the performance of proposed mechanism in terms of resuming transmissions during the handover process. In particular, we propose Markov model of TFRC capturing TCP timeouts, loss rates, and no-feedback timer expirations. We validate the proposed analytical model through simulations and show that it accurately predicts various congestion events that may happen during the handover process. We then evaluate the performance of S-TFRC via both simulations and analytical model and observe the sender rates and throughputs achieved. We also consider transmission delays and transmission rates as performance metrics and compare performance of S-TFRC with the standard TFRC. Our results show that S-TFRC is capable of providing better QoS to multimedia applications than standard TFRC by significantly reducing transmission delays and provides better throughput to multimedia applications.

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have emerged as a promising solution to the problem of spectrum under utilization and artificial radio spectrum scarcity. The paradigm of dynamic spectrum access allows a secondary network comprising of secondary users (SUs) to coexist with a primary network comprising of licensed primary users (PUs) subject to the condition that SUs do not cause any interference to the primary network. Since it is necessary for SUs to avoid any interference to the primary network, PU activity precludes attempts of SUs to access the licensed spectrum and forces frequent channel switching for SUs. This dynamic nature of CRNs, coupled with the possibility that an SU may not share a common channel with all its neighbors, makes the task of multicast routing especially challenging. In this work, we have proposed a novel multipath on-demand multicast routing protocol for CRNs. The approach of multipath routing, although commonly used in unicast routing, has not been explored for multicasting earlier. Motivated by the fact that CRNs have highly dynamic conditions, whose parameters are often unknown, the multicast routing problem is modeled in the reinforcement learning based framework of learning automata. Simulation results demonstrate that the approach of multipath multicasting is feasible, with our proposed protocol showing a superior performance to a baseline state-of-the-art CRN multicasting protocol.

In recent days, vehicles have been equipped with smart devices that offer various multimedia-related applications and services, such as smart driving assistance, traffic congestions, weather forecasting, road safety alarms, and many entertainment and comfort applications. Thus, these smart vehicles produce a large amount of multimedia-related data that require fast and real-time processing. However, due to constrained computing and storage capacities, such huge amounts of multimedia-related data cannot be processed in on-board standalone devices. Thus, multimedia cloud computing (MCC) has emerged as an economical and scalable computing technology that can process multimedia-related data efficiently while providing improved Quality of Service (QoS) to vehicular users from anywhere, at any time and on any device, at reduced costs. However, there are certain challenges, such as fast service response time and resource cost optimization, that can severely affect the performance of the MCC. Therefore, to tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a dynamic priority-based architecture for the MCC. In the proposed scheme, we divide multimedia processing into four different subphases, while computing resources to each computing server are assigned dynamically, according to the workload, in order to process multimedia tasks according to the multimedia user Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of service response time and resource cost optimization using the CloudSim simulator.

In medical body area network (MBAN) sensors are attached to a patient’s body for continuous and real-time monitoring of biomedical vital signs. Sensors send patient’s data to hospital base station so that doctors/caregivers can access it and be timely informed if patient’s condition goes critical. These tiny sensors have low data rates, small transmission ranges, limited battery power and processing capabilities. Ensuring reliability in MBAN is important due to the critical nature of patient’s data because any wrong/missing/delayed data can create a situation in which doctors may take wrong decisions about patient’s health which can have fatal results. Data transmission reliability in MBAN can be ensured by retransmissions, acknowledgments or guaranteed time slot mechanism but it causes more power consumption. We propose an efficient MAC mechanism to achieve both reliability and energy efficiency at an acceptable trade-off level. The proposed MAC mechanism not only overcomes the limitations of ZigBee MAC mechanism such as inefficient CSMA/CA and underutilization of guaranteed time slots, but also adapts for different traffic types such as emergency and normal traffic. Our results show that application level throughput and packet delivery ratio increase and packet loss decreases. We also optimize energy utilization by tuning macMaxCSMABackoffs and macMinBE parameters of ZigBee MAC mechanism.

With the overhauls and increase in network size, it becomes harder to practice maintainability along with security. In recent years, software-defined networking (SDN) has evolved to replace the traditional design of the current network, and with such evolution, raises issues in the firewall. Firewalls are one of the most important components used in networks, and new challenges have been driven by the software-defined networks in implementing firewalls. The main issue of the firewall is its speed. The speed of the firewall is a hindrance; often firewall's link speeds are slower than the supported network interface and can cause the traffic burst from the host to be buffered until packets are processed. To overcome these issues, the aim of our project is to solve by implementing duplicate instances of the firewall. By designing two topologies, a single and multiple controllers, and implementing them in a simulated environment the resulting studies show that multiple controllers in a network environment tend to show an improved performance in the network than in a single controller network.

Dynamic spectrum access is an attractive area of research these days. Cognitive Radio (CR) enabled networks are being deployed to effectively utilize the RF spectrum. Wireless mesh networks have been experiencing the bandwidth scarcity but such networks can easily enhance their throughput by using the CR transceivers as these networks have the capability of multipath routing. Existing routing proposals for Mesh Cognitive Radio Networks (MCRNs) are not considering the dynamic spectrum availability. They try to treat CRNs as traditional wireless networks. Even some proposals treat the problems of these networks like that of wired networks and use the same parameter for route discovery as for wired networks. In this paper, we propose a joint interaction between on-demand routing and channel assignment that accounts the characteristics of CRNs.

Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) are being studied intensively. The major motivation for this is the heavily underutilized frequency spectrum. CRN has the capability to utilize the unutilized frequency spectrum. Routing in CRN is a challenging task due the diversity in the available channels and data rates. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing techniques in CRNs. We first outline the design challenges for routing protocols in CRNs followed by a comprehensive survey of different routing techniques. Furthermore we classified these routing protocols into spectrum aware-based, multipathbased, local coordination-based, reactive source-based and tree-based routing techniques depending on the protocol operation.

IEEE 802.11ac is an emerging standard that operates in 5GHz frequency band and provides high data rate as compared to IEEE 802.11n. In this paper we carry out experiments in a real indoor environment and quantify the gain in average throughput provided by IEEE 802.11ac compared to IEEE 802.11n in the presence of interference caused by other IEEE 802.11n sources. The experiments are performed for both Line of Sight (LoS) and Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) conditions. We note that IEEE 802.11n (2.4GHz) provides the worst average throughput due to the highly congested 2.4GHz frequency band in our experimental environment. We find that IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) with 40MHz channel width provides a gain of 36% in average throughput compared to 20MHz channel width at a distance of 20m from the wireless router in LoS conditions. Our experimental results reveal that IEEE 802.11ac achieves 42% better average throughput when compared to the IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) at a distance of 5m in LoS conditions. Similarly, IEEE 802.11ac provides 55% improvement over IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) at a distance of 15m in NLoS conditions. We conclude that IEEE 802.11ac can effectively handle interference caused by other IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) sources and provides higher throughput than IEEE 802.11n for both LoS and NLoS conditions.