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Rapid development and massive use of Information Technology (IT) have since produced a massive amount of electronic data. In tandem, the demand for data outsourcing and the associated data security is increasing exponentially. Small organizations are often finding it expensive to save and process their huge amount of data, and keep the data secure from unauthorized access. Cloud computing is a suitable and affordable platform to provide services on user demand. The cloud platform is preferable used by individuals, Small, and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford large-scale hardware, software, and security maintenance cost. Storage and processing of big data in the cloud are becoming the key appealing features to SMEs and individuals. However, the processing of big data in the cloud is facing two issues such as security of stored data and system overload due to the volume of the data. These storage methods are plain text storage and encrypted text storage. Both methods have their strengths and limitations. The fundamental issue in plain text storage is the high risk of data security breaches; whereas, in encrypted text storage, the encryption of complete file data may cause system overload. This paper propose a feasible solution to address these issues with a new service model called Confidentiality-based Classification-as-a-Service (C2aaS) that performs data processing by treating data dynamically according to the data security level in preparation for data storing in the cloud. In comparison to the conventional methods, our proposed service model is strongly showing good security for confidential data and is proficient in reducing cloud system overloading.

Healthcare vehicles such as ambulances are the key drivers for digital and pervasive remote care for elderly patients. Thus, Healthcare Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (H-VANET) plays a vital role to empower the digital and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) for the smart medical world. Quality of Service (QoS) performance of vehicular communication can be improved through the development of a robust routing protocol having enhanced reliability and scalability. One of the most important issues in vehicular technology is allowing drivers to make trustworthy decisions, therefore building an efficient routing protocol that maintains an appropriate level of Quality of Service is a difficult task. Restricted mobility, high vehicle speeds, and continually changing topologies characterize the vehicular network environment. This paper contributes in four ways. First, it introduces adaptive, mobility-aware, and reliable routing protocols. The optimization of two routing protocols which are based on changing nature topologies of the network used for vehicular networks has been performed, amongst them, Optimized Link State Routing (Proactive) and Ad-hoc on Demand Distance Vector (Reactive) are considered for Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and throughput. Furthermore, Packet Loss Ratio (PLR), and end-to-end (E2E) delay parameters have also been calculated. Second, a healthcare vehicle system architecture for elderly patients is proposed. Third, a Platoon-based System model for routing protocols in VANET is proposed. Fourth, a dynamic channel model has been proposed for the vehicle to vehicle communication using IEEE8011.p. To optimize the QoS, the experimental setup is conducted in a discrete Network Simulator (NS-3) environment. The results reveal that the AODV routing protocol gives better performance for PDR as well as for PLR and the communication link established is also reliable for throughput. Where OLSR produces a large average delay. The adoptive mobility-aware routing protocols are potential candidates for providing Intelligent Transportation Systems with acceptable mobility, high reliability, high PDR, low PLR, and low E2E delay.

Smart healthcare is altering the delivery of healthcare by combining the benefits of IoT, mobile, and cloud computing. Cloud computing has tremendously helped the health industry connect healthcare facilities, caregivers, and patients for information sharing. The main drivers for implementing effective healthcare systems are low latency and faster response times. Thus, quick responses among healthcare organizations are important in general, but in an emergency, significant latency at different stakeholders might result in disastrous situations. Thus, cutting-edge approaches like edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) can deal with such problems. A packet cannot be sent from one location to another unless the “quality of service” (QoS) specifications are met. The term QoS refers to how well a service works for users. QoS parameters like throughput, bandwidth, transmission delay, availability, jitter, latency, and packet loss are crucial in this regard. Our focus is on the individual devices present at different levels of the smart healthcare infrastructure and the QoS requirements of the healthcare system as a whole. The contribution of this paper is five-fold: first, a novel pre-SLR method for comprehensive keyword research on subject-related themes for mining pertinent research papers for quality SLR; second, SLR on QoS improvement in smart healthcare apps; third a review of several QoS techniques used in current smart healthcare apps; fourth, the examination of the most important QoS measures in contemporary smart healthcare apps; fifth, offering solutions to the problems encountered in delivering QoS in smart healthcare IoT applications to improve healthcare services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven adaptive techniques are viable to optimize the resources in the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wearable healthcare devices. Due to the miniature size and ability of wireless data transfer, Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) have become the center of attention in current medical media technologies. For a long-term and reliable healthcare system, high energy efficiency, transmission reliability, and longer battery lifetime of wearable sensors devices are required. There is a dire need for empowering sensor-based wearable techniques in BSNs from every aspect i.e., data collection, healthcare monitoring, and diagnosis. The consideration of protocol layers, data routing, and energy optimization strategies improves the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Hence, this work presents some key contributions. Firstly, it proposes a novel avant-garde framework to simultaneously optimize the energy efficiency, battery lifetime, and reliability for smart and connected healthcare. Secondly, in this study, an Adaptive Transmission Data Rate (ATDR) mechanism is proposed, which works on the average constant energy consumption by varying the active time of the sensor node to optimize the energy over the dynamic wireless channel. Moreover, a Self-Adaptive Routing Algorithm (SARA) is developed to adopt a dynamic source routing mechanism with an energy-efficient and shortest possible path, unlike the conventional routing methods. Lastly, real-time datasets are adopted for intensive experimental setup for revealing pervasive and cost-effective healthcare through wearable devices. It is observed and analysed that proposed algorithms outperform in terms of high energy efficiency, better reliability, and longer battery lifetime of portable devices.

These days, the Industrial Internet of Healthcare Things (IIT) enabled applications have been growing progressively in practice. These applications are ubiquitous and run onto the different computing nodes for healthcare goals. The applications have these tasks such as online healthcare monitoring, live heartbeat streaming, and blood pressure monitoring and need a lot of resources for execution. In IIoHT, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism-based applications have been widely designed with the network and computational delay constraints to run healthcare applications. However, there are many requirements of IIoHT applications such as security, network and computation, and failure efficient RPC with optimizing the quality of services of applications. In this study, the work devised the lightweight RPC mechanism for IIoHT applications and considered the hybrid constraints in the system. The study suggests the secure hybrid delay scheme (SHDS), which schedules all healthcare workloads under their deadlines. For the scheduling problem, the study formulated this problem based on linear integer programming, where all constraints are integer, as shown in the mathematical model. Simulation results show that the proposed SHDS scheme and lightweight RPC outperformed the hybrid for IIoHT applications and minimized 50% delays compared to existing RPC and their schemes.

Combating the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most promising issues in global healthcare. Accurate and fast diagnosis of COVID-19 cases is required for the right medical treatment to control this pandemic. Chest radiography imaging techniques are more effective than the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method in detecting coronavirus. Due to the limited availability of medical images, transfer learning is better suited to classify patterns in medical images. This paper presents a combined architecture of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to diagnose COVID-19 patients from chest X-rays. The deep transfer techniques used in this experiment are VGG19, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, and Inception-ResNetV2, where CNN is used to extract complex features from samples and classify them using RNN. In our experiments, the VGG19-RNN architecture outperformed all other networks in terms of accuracy. Finally, decision-making regions of images were visualized using gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM). The system achieved promising results compared to other existing systems and might be validated in the future when more samples would be available. The experiment demonstrated a good alternative method to diagnose COVID-19 for medical staff.All the data used during the study are openly available from the Mendeley data repository at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/mxc6vb7svm. For further research, we have made the source code publicly available at https://github.com/Asraf047/COVID19-CNN-RNN.

The rapid technological advancements in the current modern world bring the attention of researchers to fast and real-time healthcare and monitoring systems. Smart healthcare is one of the best choices for this purpose, in which different on-body and off-body sensors and devices monitor and share patient data with healthcare personnel and hospitals for quick and real-time decisions about patients’ health. Cognitive radio (CR) can be very useful for effective and smart healthcare systems to send and receive patient’s health data by exploiting the primary user’s (PU) spectrum. In this paper, tree-based algorithms (TBAs) of machine learning (ML) are investigated to evaluate spectrum sensing in CR-based smart healthcare systems. The required data sets for TBAs are created based on the probability of detection (Pd) and probability of false alarm (Pf). These data sets are used to train and test the system by using fine tree, coarse tree, ensemble boosted tree, medium tree, ensemble bagged tree, ensemble RUSBoosted tree, and optimizable tree. Training and testing accuracies of all TBAs are calculated for both simulated and theoretical data sets. The comparison of training and testing accuracies of all classifiers is presented for the different numbers of received signal samples. Results depict that optimizable tree gives the best accuracy results to evaluate the spectrum sensing with minimum classification error (MCE).

These days, healthcare applications on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) network have been growing to deal with different diseases via different sensors. These healthcare sensors are connecting to the various healthcare fog servers. The hospitals are geographically distributed and offer different services to the patients from any ubiquitous network. However, due to the full offloading of data to the insecure servers, two main challenges exist in the IoMT network. (i) Data security of workflows healthcare applications between different fog healthcare nodes. (ii) The cost-efficient and QoS efficient scheduling of healthcare applications in the IoMT system. This paper devises the Cost-Efficient Service Selection and Execution and Blockchain-Enabled Serverless Network for Internet of Medical Things system. The goal is to choose cost-efficient services and schedule all tasks based on their QoS and minimum execution cost. Simulation results show that the proposed outperform all existing schemes regarding data security, validation by 10%, and cost of application execution by 33% in IoMT.

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) is an integral aspect of the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC). As the prevalence of software systems increases and becomes more integrated into our daily lives, so the complexity of these systems increases the risks of widespread defects. With reliance on these systems increasing, the ability to accurately identify a defective model using Machine Learning (ML) has been overlooked and less addressed. Thus, this article contributes an investigation of various ML techniques for SDP. An investigation, comparative analysis and recommendation of appropriate Feature Extraction (FE) techniques, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Partial Least Squares Regression (PLS), Feature Selection (FS) techniques, Fisher score, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), and Elastic Net are presented. Validation of the following techniques, both separately and in combination with ML algorithms, is performed: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree (DT), and ensemble learning methods Bootstrap Aggregation (Bagging), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest(RF), and Generalized Stacking (Stacking). Extensive experimental setup was built and the results of the experiments revealed that FE and FS can both positively and negatively affect performance over the base model or Baseline. PLS, both separately and in combination with FS techniques, provides impressive, and the most consistent, improvements, while PCA, in combination with Elastic-Net, shows acceptable improvement.

Deep learning (DL) driven cardiac image processing methods manage and monitor the massive medical data collected by the internet of things (IoT) based on wearable devices. A Joint DL and IoT platform are known as Deep-IoMT that extracts the accurate cardiac image data from noisy conventional devices and tools. Besides, smart and dynamic technological trends have caught the attention of every corner such as, healthcare, which is possible through portable and lightweight sensor-enabled devices. Tiny size and resource-constrained nature restrict them to perform several tasks at a time. Thus, energy drain, limited battery lifetime, and high packet loss ratio (PLR) are the keys challenges to be tackled carefully for ubiquitous medical care. Sustainability (i.e., longer battery lifetime), energy efficiency, and reliability are the vital ingredients for wearable devices to empower a cost-effective and pervasive healthcare environment. Thus, the key contribution of this paper is the sixth fold. First, a novel self-adaptive power control-based enhanced efficient-aware approach (EEA) is proposed to reduce energy consumption and enhance the battery lifetime and reliability. The proposed EEA and conventional constant TPC are evaluated by adopting real-time data traces of static (i.e., sitting) and dynamic (i.e., cycling) activities and cardiac images. Second, a novel joint DL-IoMT framework is proposed for the cardiac image processing of remote elderly patients. Third, DL driven layered architecture for IoMT is proposed. Forth, the battery model for IoMT is proposed by adopting the features of a wireless channel and body postures. Fifth, network performance is optimized by introducing sustainability, energy drain, and PLR and average threshold RSSI indicators. Sixth, a Use-case for cardiac image-enabled elderly patient's monitoring is proposed. Finally, it is revealed through experimental results in MATLAB that the proposed EEA scheme performs better than the constant TPC by enhancing energy efficiency, sustainability, and reliability during data transmission for elderly healthcare.

The growing network density and unprecedented increase in network traffic, caused by the massively expanding number of connected devices and online services, require intelligent network operations. Machine Learning (ML) has been applied in this regard in different types of networks and networking technologies to meet the requirements of future communicating devices and services. In this article, we provide a detailed account of current research on the application of ML in communication networks and shed light on future research challenges. Research on the application of ML in communication networks is described in: i) the three layers, i.e., physical, access, and network layers; and ii) novel computing and networking concepts such as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and a brief overview of ML-based network security. Important future research challenges are identified and presented to help stir further research in key areas in this direction.

Secure and reliable sensing plays the key role for cognitive tracking i.e., activity identification and cognitive monitoring of every individual. Over the last years there has been an increasing interest from both academia and industry in cognitive authentication also known as biometric recognition. These are an effect of individuals’ biological and physiological traits. Among various traditional biometric and physiological features, we include cognitive/brainwaves via electroencephalogram (EEG) which function as a unique performance indicator due to its reliable, flexible, and unique trait resulting in why it is hard for an un-authorized entity(ies) to breach the boundaries by stealing or mimicking them. Conventional security and privacy techniques in the medical domain are not the potential candidates to simultaneously provide both security and energy efficiency. Therefore, state-of-the art biometrics methods (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, etc.) their applications with novel solutions are investigated and recommended. The experimental setup considers EEG data analysis and interpretation of BCI. The key purpose of this setup is to reduce the number of electrodes and hence the computational power of the Random Forest (RF) classifier while testing EEG data. The performance of the random forest classifier was based on EEG datasets for 20 subjects. We found that the total number of occurred events revealed 96.1% precision in terms of chosen events.

Mobile-cloud-based healthcare applications are increasingly growing in practice. For instance, healthcare, transport, and shopping applications are designed on the basis of the mobile cloud. For executing mobile-cloud applications, offloading and scheduling are fundamental mechanisms. However, mobile healthcare workflow applications with these methods are widely ignored, demanding applications in various aspects for healthcare monitoring, live healthcare service, and biomedical firms. However, these offloading and scheduling schemes do not consider the workflow applications’ execution in their models. This paper develops a lightweight secure efficient offloading scheduling (LSEOS) metaheuristic model. LSEOS consists of light weight, and secure offloading and scheduling methods whose execution offloading delay is less than that of existing methods. The objective of LSEOS is to run workflow applications on other nodes and minimize the delay and security risk in the system. The metaheuristic LSEOS consists of the following components: adaptive deadlines, sorting, and scheduling with neighborhood search schemes. Compared to current strategies for delay and security validation in a model, computational results revealed that the LSEOS outperformed all available offloading and scheduling methods for process applications by 10% security ratio and by 29% regarding delays.

This paper presents a new design of a compact, high-gain coplanar waveguide-fed antenna and proposes a multielement approach to attain enhanced characteristics. The proposed method overcomes the simulation and geometrical complexity and achieves optimal performance features. The antenna prototype is carefully designed, and simulation results have been analyzed. The proposed antenna was fabricated on a new WangLing TP-2 laminate with dimensions (0.195λ × 0.163λ × 0.0052λ) at the lowest resonance of 9.78 GHz. The results have been tested and experimentally verified. The antenna model achieved excellent performance including a peak realized gain better than 9.0 dBi, optimal radiation efficiency better than 87.6% over the operating band, and a good relative bandwidth of 11.48% at 10 dB return loss. Symmetrical stable far-field radiation pattern in orthogonal planes and strong distribution of current are observed. Moreover, a comparative analysis with state-of-the-artwork is presented. The measured and simulation result shows a good agreement. The high-performance antenna results reveal that the proposed model is a good contender of military airborne, land, and naval radar applications.

Currently, medical media technologies have become a center of attention due to emerging trends in miniaturized wearable devices from factories to health corner stores everywhere. Due to the power-constrained nature of these portable devices, it is challenging to adopt them during critical medical operations and diagnoses. Maximizing energy efficiency and, hence, extending the battery life is vital. In addition, conventional approaches with constant transmission power are inappropriate option for green and smart healthcare. Thus, this paper first proposes a transmission power control (TPC)-based energy-efficient algorithm (EEA) for when a subject is in different postures, i.e., standing, walking, and running, in wireless body sensor networks. Second, a hardware platform was developed on the Intel Galileo board to test and compare the proposed EEA and conventional adaptive TPC (ATPC) in terms of energy and channel reliability or packet loss ratio (PLR). Experimental results revealed that the proposed EEA obtained energy savings of 42.5% with an acceptable PLR compared with that of the traditional ATPC method.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the revolutionary paradigm to empower sixth generation (6G) edge computing based e-healthcare for everyone. Thus, this research aims to promote an AI-based cost-effective and efficient healthcare application. The cyber physical system (CPS) is a key player in the internet world where humans and their personal devices such as cell phones, laptops, wearables, etc., facilitate the healthcare environment. The data extracting, examining and monitoring strategies from sensors and actuators in the entire medical landscape are facilitated by cloud-enabled technologies for absorbing and accepting the entire emerging wave of revolution. The efficient and accurate examination of voluminous data from the sensor devices poses restrictions in terms of bandwidth, delay and energy. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), the driven healthcare system must be smart, interoperable, convergent, and reliable to provide pervasive and cost-effective healthcare platforms. Unfortunately, because of higher power consumption and lesser packet delivery rate, achieving interoperable, convergent, and reliable transmission is challenging in connected healthcare. In such a scenario, this paper has fourfold major contributions. The first contribution is the development of a single chip wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) with the support of an analog front end (AFE) chip model (i.e., ADS1292R) for gathering the ECG data to examine the health status of elderly or chronic patients with the IoT-based cyber physical system (CPS). The second proposes a fuzzy-based sustainable, interoperable, and reliable algorithm (FSIRA), which is an intelligent and self-adaptive decision-making approach to prioritize emergency and critical patients in association with the selected parameters for improving healthcare quality at reasonable costs. The third is the proposal of a specific cloud-based architecture for mobile and connected healthcare. The fourth is the identification of the right balance between reliability, packet loss ratio, convergence, latency, interoperability, and throughput to support an adaptive IoMT driven connected healthcare. It is examined and observed that our proposed approaches outperform the conventional techniques by providing high reliability, high convergence, interoperability, and a better foundation to analyze and interpret the accuracy in systems from a medical health aspect. As for the IoMT, an enabled healthcare cloud is the key ingredient on which to focus, as it also faces the big hurdle of less bandwidth, more delay and energy drain. Thus, we propose the mathematical trade-offs between bandwidth, interoperability, reliability, delay, and energy dissipation for IoMT-oriented smart healthcare over a 6G platform.

Since the purchase of Siri by Apple, and its release with the iPhone 4S in 2011, virtual assistants (VAs) have grown in number and popularity. The sophisticated natural language processing and speech recognition employed by VAs enables users to interact with them conversationally, almost as they would with another human. To service user voice requests, VAs transmit large amounts of data to their vendors; these data are processed and stored in the Cloud. The potential data security and privacy issues involved in this process provided the motivation to examine the current state of the art in VA research. In this study, we identify peer-reviewed literature that focuses on security and privacy concerns surrounding these assistants, including current trends in addressing how voice assistants are vulnerable to malicious attacks and worries that the VA is recording without the user’s knowledge or consent. The findings show that not only are these worries manifold, but there is a gap in the current state of the art, and no current literature reviews on the topic exist. This review sheds light on future research directions, such as providing solutions to perform voice authentication without an external device, and the compliance of VAs with privacy regulations.

This article presents comparison between data rate or rate control, that is, video transmission rate control algorithm and transmission power control algorithms for two different cases. First, energy consumption due to high peak variable data rates in video transmission. Second, energy depletion due to high transmission power consumption and dynamic nature of wireless on-body channel. The former one focuses on constant (fixed) transmission power level and variable data rate (“severe” conditions), for example, medical monitoring of the emergency patients. The latter considers variable transmission power level and constant (fixed) data rate (“less severe” conditions), for example, electrocardiography measurement for patients in wireless body sensor networks. Besides, energy efficiency comparison analysis of battery-driven or video transmission rate control algorithm and transmission power control–driven or power control algorithm is presented. Finally, proposed algorithms are analyzed and categorized as energy-efficient and battery-friendly for medical applications in wireless body sensor networks.

Rapid progress and emerging trends in miniaturized medical devices have enabled the un-obtrusive monitoring of physiological signals and daily activities of everyone’s life in a prominent and pervasive manner. Due to the power-constrained nature of conventional wearable sensor devices during ubiquitous sensing (US), energy-efficiency has become one of the highly demanding and debatable issues in healthcare. This paper develops a single chip-based wearable wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system by adopting analog front end (AFE) chip model ADS1292R from Texas Instruments. The developed chip collects real-time ECG data with two adopted channels for continuous monitoring of human heart activity. Then, these two channels and the AFE are built into a right leg drive right leg drive (RLD) driver circuit with lead-off detection and medical graded test signal. Human ECG data was collected at 60 beats per minute (BPM) to 120 BPM with 60 Hz noise and considered throughout the experimental set-up. Moreover, notch filter (cutoff frequency 60 Hz), high-pass filter (cutoff frequency 0.67 Hz), and low-pass filter (cutoff frequency 100 Hz) with cut-off frequencies of 60 Hz, 0.67 Hz, and 100 Hz, respectively, were designed with bilinear transformation for rectifying the power-line noise and artifacts while extracting real-time ECG signals. Finally, a transmission power control-based energy-efficient (ETPC) algorithm is proposed, implemented on the hardware and then compared with the several conventional TPC methods. Experimental results reveal that our developed chip collects real-time ECG data efficiently, and the proposed ETPC algorithm achieves higher energy savings of 35.5% with a slightly larger packet loss ratio (PLR) as compared to conventional TPC (e.g., constant TPC, Gao’s, and Xiao’s methods).