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Abstract Robust wireless communication using relaying system and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) will be extensively used for future IoT applications. In this paper, we consider a fall detection IoT application in which elderly patients are equipped with wearable motion sensors. Patient motion data is sent to fog data servers via a NOMA-based relaying system, thereby improving the communication reliability. We analyze the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) performance of the NOMA-based relaying system, where the source node transmits two different symbols to the relay and destination node by employing superposition coding over Rayleigh fading channels. In the amplify-and-forward (AF) based relaying, the relay re-transmits the received signal after amplification, whereas, in the decode-and-forward (DF) based relaying, the relay only re-transmits the symbol having lower NOMA power coefficient. We derive closed-form average SINR expressions for AF and DF relaying systems using NOMA. The average SINR expressions for AF and DF relaying systems are derived in terms of computationally efficient functions, namely Tricomi confluent hypergeometric and Meijer’s G functions. Through simulations, it is shown that the average SINR values computed using the derived analytical expressions are in excellent agreement with the simulation-based average SINR results.

Advancements in the agricultural sector are essential because the need for food is rising as the population of the world is expanding day by day. Traditional agricultural practices are not able to fulfill these needs. Furthermore, these practices are manual and are not optimized resulting in the wastage of resources, which is not suitable for resource-constrained agricultural environments. Besides this, the Internet of Things (IoT) network is playing an important role in the modern farming system. In this paper, we introduce an innovative IoT-enabled hybrid model for smart agriculture, integrating Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to provide a cost-effective and reliable decision-making system. Furthermore, we introduce a robust anomaly detection mechanism while applying the capabilities of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) on the dry beans’ dataset. Hybrid models, combining neural networks with Random Forest and SVM, were also explored for anomaly detection in the dataset. Furthermore, deep learning models known as MobileNetV2, VGG16, and InceptionV3 are used for the classification of soil type datasets. The hybrid deep learning models were also developed, incorporating InceptionV3 with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and VGG16 with fully connected dense layers. Two types of data sets are used in this study, which are the dry beans dataset (2021) and soil type Dataset (2024). Both datasets contain images. The ML techniques are applied to these datasets for anomaly detection. The simulations results show that the classification performance of the MobileNetV2 model, it has an accuracy and recall of 0.97. It shows that the model can correctly identify the soil type around 97%. On the other hand, the hybrid model combining random forest and neural network achieved an accuracy of 92%, further validating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, the SVM model achieves an impressive overall accuracy of 0.93. Additionally, this accuracy is further enhanced with the integration of SVM and neural networks. Similarly, the hybrid model combining inception V3 with the LSTM layer exhibits a notable accuracy of 0.91, highlighting its efficiency in accurately classifying various instances. Lastly, the hybrid model employing random forest and neural network architecture achieves a commendable accuracy of 92%.

As electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming more common and the need for sustainable energy practices is growing, better management of EV charging station loads is a necessity. The simple act of folding renewable power from solar or wind in an EV charging system presents a huge opportunity to make them even greener as well as improve grid resiliency. This paper proposes an innovative EV charging station energy consumption forecasting approach by incorporating integrated renewable energy data. The optimization is achieved through the application of SARLDNet, which enhances predictive accuracy and reduces forecast errors, thereby allowing for more efficient energy allocation and load management in EV charging stations. The technique leverages comprehensive solar and wind energy statistics alongside detailed EV charging station utilization data collected over 3.5 years from various locations across California. To ensure data integrity, missing data were meticulously addressed, and data quality was enhanced. The Boruta approach was employed for feature selection, identifying critical predictors, and improving the dataset through feature engineering to elucidate energy consumption trends. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) signal decomposition extracts intrinsic mode functions, revealing temporal patterns and significantly boosting forecasting accuracy. This study introduces a novel stem-auxiliary-reduction-LSTM-dense network (SARLDNet) architecture tailored for robust regression analysis. This architecture combines regularization, dense output layers, LSTM-based temporal context learning, dimensionality reduction, and early feature extraction to mitigate overfitting. The performance of SARLDNet is benchmarked against established models including LSTM, XGBoost, and ARIMA, demonstrating superior accuracy with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 7.2%, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 22.3 kWh, and R2 Score of 0.87. This validation of SARLDNet’s potential for real-world applications, with its enhanced predictive accuracy and reduced error rates across various EV charging stations, is a reason for optimism in the field of renewable energy and EV infrastructure planning. This study also emphasizes the role of cloud infrastructure in enabling real-time forecasting and decision support. By facilitating scalable and efficient data processing, the insights generated support informed energy management and infrastructure planning decisions under dynamic conditions, empowering the audience to adopt sustainable energy practices.

The emergence of delay-sensitive and computationally-intensive mobile applications and services pose a significant challenge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) devices due to the scarcity in their resources such as computational power and battery lifetime. Mobile cloud computing has been introduced as a promising solution to overcome these limitations through task offloading. However, high-latency and security issues are considered the main challenges of this paradigm. Subsequently, the edge-cloud computing paradigm has been introduced and widely used to help to mitigate these issues. Nevertheless, the current task offloading models permit UAVs to execute their intensive tasks at the connected edge server, which leads to excessive loads due to the large number of UAVs and thereby increases the delay. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a delay-optimal task offloading approach for multi-tier edge-cloud computing in a multi-user environment. The problem is formulated as an optimization model using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) techniques to minimize the total service time of UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only saves the service time by 33.5% and 55% for edge and cloud execution policies respectively, but also scales well for a large number of UAVs.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are poised to play a central role in revolutionizing future services offered by the envisioned smart cities, thanks to their agility, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. UAVs are being widely deployed in different verticals including surveillance, search and rescue missions, delivery of items, and as an infrastructure for aerial communications in future wireless networks. UAVs can be used to survey target locations, collect raw data from the ground (i.e., video streams), generate computing task(s) and offload it to the available servers for processing. In this work, we formulate a multi-objective optimization framework for both the network resource allocation and the UAV trajectory planning problem using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimization model. In consideration of the different stake holders that may exist in a Cloud-Fog environment, we minimize the sum of a weighted objective function, which allows network operators to tune the weights to emphasize/de-emphasize different cost functions such as the end-to-end network power consumption (EENPC), processing power consumption (PPC), UAV’s total flight distance (UAVTFD), and UAV’s total power consumption (UAVTPC). Our optimization models and results enable the optimum offloading decisions to be made under different constraints relating to EENPC, PPC, UAVTFD and UAVTPC which we explore in detail. For example, when the UAV’s propulsion efficiency (UPE) is at its worst (10% considered), offloading via the macro base station is the best choice and a maximum power saving of 34% can be achieved. Extensive studies on the UAV’s coverage path planning (CPP) and computation offloading have been conducted, but none has tackled the issue in a practical Cloud-Fog architecture in which all the elements of the access, metro and core layers are considered when evaluating the service offloading in a distributed architecture like the Cloud-Fog.

Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) devices and their services and applications are gaining popularity and attracting considerable attention in different fields of our daily life. Nevertheless, most of these applications and services require more powerful computational resources and energy, and their limited battery capacity and processing power make it difficult to run them on a single device. Edge-Cloud Computing (ECC) is emerging as a new paradigm to cope with the challenges of these applications, which moves computing resources to the edge of the network and remote cloud, thereby alleviating the overhead through task offloading. Even though ECC offers substantial benefits for these devices, the limited bandwidth condition in the case of simultaneous offloading via the same channel with increasing data transmission of these applications has not been adequately addressed. Moreover, protecting the data through transmission remains a significant concern that still needs to be addressed. Therefore, in this paper, to bypass the limited bandwidth and address the potential security threats challenge, a new compression, security, and energy-aware task offloading framework is proposed for the ECC system environment. Specifically, we first introduce an efficient layer of compression to smartly reduce the transmission data over the channel. In addition, to address the security issue, a new layer of security based on an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic technique is presented to protect offloaded and sensitive data from different vulnerabilities. Subsequently, task offloading, data compression, and security are jointly formulated as a mixed integer problem whose objective is to reduce the overall energy of the system under latency constraints. Finally, simulation results reveal that our model is scalable and can cause a significant reduction in energy consumption (i.e., 19%, 18%, 21%, 14.5%, 13.1% and 12%) with respect to other benchmarks (i.e., local, edge, cloud and further benchmark models).

The current agriculture systems compete to take advantage of industry advanced technologies, including the internet of things (IoT), cloud/fog/edge computing, artificial intelligence, and agricultural robots to monitor, track, analyze and process various functions and services in real-time. Additionally, these technologies can make the agricultural processes smarter and more cost-efficient by using automated systems and eliminating any human interventions, hence enhancing agricultural production to meet future expectations. Although the current agriculture systems that adopt the traditional cloud-based architecture have provided powerful computing infrastructure to distributed IoT sensors. However, the cost of energy consumption associated with transferring heterogeneous data over the multiple network tiers to process, analyze and store the sensor’s information in the cloud has created a huge load on information and communication infrastructure. Besides, the energy consumed by cloud data centers has an environmental impact associated with using non-clean fuels, which usually release carbon emissions (CO2) to produce electricity. Thus, to tackle these issues, we propose a new integrated edge-fog-cloud architectural paradigm that promises to enhance the energy-efficient of smart agriculture systems and corresponding carbon emissions. This architecture allows data collection from several sensors to process and analyze the agriculture data that require real-time operation (e.g., weather temperature, soil moisture, soil acidity, irrigation, etc.) in several layers (edge, fog, and cloud). Thus, the real-time processing could be held by the edge and fog layers to reduce the load on the cloud layer, which will help to enhance the overall energy consumption and process the agriculture applications/services efficiently. Mathematical modeling is conducted using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) for a smart agriculture environment, where the proposed architecture is implemented, and results are analyzed and compared to the traditional implementation. According to the results of thousands of agriculture sensors, the proposed architecture outperforms the traditional cloud-based architecture in terms of reducing the overall energy consumption by 36% and the carbon emissions by 43%. In addition to these achievements, the results show that our proposed architecture can reduce network traffic by up to 86%, which can reduce network congestion. Finally, we develop a heuristic algorithm to validate and mimic the presented approach, and it shows comparable results to the MILP model.

Fog computing is developed to complement cloud computing by extending the cloud services (computing, storage, networking, and management) to the edge of the network in order to reduce service latency. Correspondingly, the incremental use of cloud/fog resources and their applications has increased energy consumption and carbon emissions (CO2) of the data centers, which caused significant environmental challenges. Optimizing the placement of the requested resources and applications (e.g., in the form of virtual machines (VMs)) is one of the main solutions, which has a primary effect in reducing the energy consumption of cloud/fog architectures and consequently their CO2 emissions. However, due to the geographic distribution of cloud and fog data centers, there are varying levels of CO2 emissions to consider, which makes optimizing the placement of resources and applications in distributed cloud/fog more challenging than in centralized clouds in terms of carbon efficiency. In this paper, we propose a multi-level approach using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the CO2 emissions of data centers by optimizing the resources usage and the placement of VMs in fog-cloud environments. This approach calculates the CO2 emissions of the British Telecom (BT) network based on the carbon intensity data from the National Grid ESO, considering several scenarios of traffic demand during different times of the day and year. The results show that the optimal location to host applications highly relies on the carbon intensity and traffic demands. The results also show there is a trade-off between CO2 emission reduced by shortening network journey, and CO2 emission increased by hosting more applications into the fog nodes. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposed green fog-cloud architecture outperforms the central cloud and the distributed clouds in terms of reducing the total CO2 emission by up to 91% and 71%, respectively. Finally, we develop a heuristic algorithm to mimic and validate the presented work, and it shows comparable results to the MILP model.

Network neutrality is the principle of treating equally all Internet traffic regardless of its source, destination, content, application or other related distinguishing metrics. Under net neutrality, Internet service providers (ISPs) are compelled to charge all content providers (CPs) the same per Gbps rate despite the growing profit achieved by CPs. In this paper, we study the impact of the repeal of net neutrality on communication networks by developing a techno-economic Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to maximize the potential profit ISPs can achieve by offering their services to CPs. We consider an ISP that offers CPs different classes of service representing typical video content qualities. The MILP model maximizes the ISP profit by optimizing the prices of the different classes according to the users' demand sensitivity to the change in price, referred to as Price Elasticity of Demand (PED). We analyze how PED impacts the profit in different CP delivery scenarios in cloud-fog architectures. The results show that the repeal of net neutrality can potentially increase ISPs profit by a factor of 8 with a pricing scheme that discriminates against data intensive content. Also, the repeal of net neutrality positively impacts the network energy efficiency by reducing the core network power consumption by 55% as a result of suppressing data intensive content compared to the net neutrality scenario.

Fog computing is an emerging paradigm that aims to improve the efficiency and QoS of cloud computing by extending the cloud to the edge of the network. This paper develops a comprehensive energy efficiency analysis framework based on mathematical modeling and heuristics to study the offloading of virtual machine (VM) services from the cloud to the fog. The analysis addresses the impact of different factors including the traffic between the VM and its users, the VM workload, the workload versus number of users profile and the proximity of fog nodes to users. Overall, the power consumption can be reduced if the VM users' traffic is high and/or the VMs have a linear power profile. In such a linear profile case, the creation of multiple VM replicas does not increase the computing power consumption significantly (there may be a slight increase due to idle / baseline power consumption) if the number of users remains constant, however the VM replicas can be brought closer to the end users, thus reducing the transport network power consumption. In our scenario, the optimum placement of VMs over a cloud-fog architecture significantly decreased the total power consumption by 56% and 64% under high user data rates compared to optimized distributed clouds placement and placement in the existing AT&T network cloud locations, respectively.