CERP: Cooperative and Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), constrained by limited resources, demand routing strategies that prioritize energy efficiency. The tactic of cooperative routing, which leverages the broadcast nature of wireless channels, has garnered attention for its capability to amplify routing efficacy. This manuscript introduces a power-conscious routing approach, tailored for resource-restricted WSNs. By exploiting cooperative communications, we introduce an innovative relay node selection technique within clustered networks, aiming to curtail energy usage while safeguarding data dependability. This inventive methodology has been amalgamated into the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), giving rise to the cooperative and efficient routing protocol (CERP). The devised CERP protocol pinpoints and selects the most efficacious relay node, ensuring that packet transmission is both energy-minimal and reliable. Performance evaluations were executed to substantiate the proposed strategy, and its practicality was examined using an Arduino-based sensor node and the Contiki operating system in real-world scenarios. The outcomes affirm the efficacy of the proposed strategy, outshining the standard RPL concerning reliability and energy conservation, enhancing RPL reliability by 10% and energy savings by 18%. This paper is posited to contribute to the evolution of power-conscious routing strategies for WSNs, crucial for prolonging sensor node battery longevity while sustaining dependable communication.

Machine learning based efficient prediction of positive cases of waterborne diseases.

BACKGROUND: Water quality has been compromised and endangered by different contaminants due to Pakistan's rapid population development, which has resulted in a dramatic rise in waterborne infections and afflicted many regions of Pakistan. Because of this, modeling and predicting waterborne diseases has become a hot topic for researchers and is very important for controlling waterborne disease pollution. METHODS: In our study, first, we collected typhoid and malaria patient data for the years 2017-2020 from Ayub Medical Hospital. The collected data set has seven important input features. In the current study, different ML models were first trained and tested on the current study dataset using the tenfold cross-validation method. Second, we investigated the importance of input features in waterborne disease-positive case detection. The experiment results showed that Random Forest correctly predicted malaria-positive cases 60% of the time and typhoid-positive cases 77% of the time, which is better than other machine-learning models. In this research, we have also investigated the input features that are more important in the prediction and will help analyze positive cases of waterborne disease. The random forest feature selection technique has been used, and experimental results have shown that age, history, and test results play an important role in predicting waterborne disease-positive cases. In the end, we concluded that this interesting study could help health departments in different areas reduce the number of people who get sick from the water.

Advances in IoMT for Healthcare Systems.

Nowadays, the demand for healthcare to transform from traditional hospital and disease-centered services to smart healthcare and patient-centered services, including the health management, biomedical diagnosis, and remote monitoring of patients with chronic diseases, is growing tremendously [...].

COV-DLS: Prediction of COVID-19 from X-Rays Using Enhanced Deep Transfer Learning Techniques.

In this paper, modifications in neoteric architectures such as VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, and InceptionV3 are proposed for the classification of COVID-19 using chest X-rays. The proposed architectures termed "COV-DLS" consist of two phases: heading model construction and classification. The heading model construction phase utilizes four modified deep learning architectures, namely Modified-VGG16, Modified-VGG19, Modified-ResNet50, and Modified-InceptionV3. An attempt is made to modify these neoteric architectures by incorporating the average pooling and dense layers. The dropout layer is also added to prevent the overfitting problem. Two dense layers with different activation functions are also added. Thereafter, the output of these modified models is applied during the classification phase, when COV-DLS are applied on a COVID-19 chest X-ray image data set. Classification accuracy of 98.61% is achieved by Modified-VGG16, 97.22% by Modified-VGG19, 95.13% by Modified-ResNet50, and 99.31% by Modified-InceptionV3. COV-DLS outperforms existing deep learning models in terms of accuracy and F1-score.

Prioritising Organisational Factors Impacting Cloud ERP Adoption and the Critical Issues Related to Security, Usability, and Vendors: A Systematic Literature Review.

Cloud ERP is a type of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that runs on the vendor's cloud platform instead of an on-premises network, enabling companies to connect through the Internet. The goal of this study was to rank and prioritise the factors driving cloud ERP adoption by organisations and to identify the critical issues in terms of security, usability, and vendors that impact adoption of cloud ERP systems. The assessment of critical success factors (CSFs) in on-premises ERP adoption and implementation has been well documented; however, no previous research has been carried out on CSFs in cloud ERP adoption. Therefore, the contribution of this research is to provide research and practice with the identification and analysis of 16 CSFs through a systematic literature review, where 73 publications on cloud ERP adoption were assessed from a range of different conferences and journals, using inclusion and exclusion criteria. Drawing from the literature, we found security, usability, and vendors were the top three most widely cited critical issues for the adoption of cloud-based ERP; hence, the second contribution of this study was an integrative model constructed with 12 drivers based on the security, usability, and vendor characteristics that may have greater influence as the top critical issues in the adoption of cloud ERP systems. We also identified critical gaps in current research, such as the inconclusiveness of findings related to security critical issues, usability critical issues, and vendor critical issues, by highlighting the most important drivers influencing those issues in cloud ERP adoption and the lack of discussion on the nature of the criticality of those CSFs. This research will aid in the development of new strategies or the revision of existing strategies and polices aimed at effectively integrating cloud ERP into cloud computing infrastructure. It will also allow cloud ERP suppliers to determine organisations' and business owners' expectations and implement appropriate tactics. A better understanding of the CSFs will narrow the field of failure and assist practitioners and managers in increasing their chances of success.

Optimal Scheduling of Campus Microgrid Considering the Electric Vehicle Integration in Smart Grid.

High energy consumption, rising environmental concerns and depleting fossil fuels demand an increase in clean energy production. The enhanced resiliency, efficiency and reliability offered by microgrids with distributed energy resources (DERs) have shown to be a promising alternative to the conventional grid system. Large-sized commercial customers like institutional complexes have put significant efforts to promote sustainability by establishing renewable energy systems at university campuses. This paper proposes the integration of a photovoltaic (PV) system, energy storage system (ESS) and electric vehicles (EV) at a University campus. An optimal energy management system (EMS) is proposed to optimally dispatch the energy from available energy resources. The problem is mapped in a Linear optimization problem and simulations are carried out in MATLAB. Simulation results showed that the proposed EMS ensures the continuous power supply and decreases the energy consumption cost by nearly 45%. The impact of EV as a storage tool is also observed. EVs acting as a source of energy reduced the energy cost by 45.58% and as a load by 19.33%. The impact on the cost for continuous power supply in case of a power outage is also analyzed.

Cognitive IoT-Based e-Learning System: Enabling Context-Aware Remote Schooling during the Pandemic.

The 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic had far-reaching consequences beyond the spread of the disease and efforts to cure it. Today, it is obvious that the pandemic devastated key sectors ranging from health to economy, culture, and education. As far as education is concerned, one direct result of the spread of the pandemic was the resort to suspending traditional in-person classroom courses and relying on remote learning and homeschooling instead, by exploiting e-learning technologies, but many challenges are faced by these technologies. Most of these challenges are centered around the efficiency of these delivery methods, interactivity, and knowledge testing. These issues raise the need to develop an advanced smart educational system that assists home-schooled students, provides teachers with a range of smart new tools, and enable a dynamic and interactive e-learning experience. Technologies like the Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), including cognitive models and context-awareness, can be a driving force in the future of e-learning, opening many opportunities to overcome the limitation of the existing remote learning systems and provide an efficient reliable augmented learning experience. Furthermore, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), introduced in education as a way for asynchronous learning, can be a second driving force of future synchronous learning. The teacher and students can see each other in a virtual class even if they are geographically spread in a city, a country, or the globe. The main goal of this work is to design and provide a model supporting intelligent teaching assisting and engaging e-learning activity. This paper presents a new model, ViRICTA, an intelligent system, proposing an end-to-end solution with a stack technology integrating the Internet of things and artificial intelligence. The designed system aims to enable a valuable learning experience, providing an efficient, interactive, and proactive context-aware learning smart services.

Healthcare and Fitness Data Management Using the IoT-Based Blockchain Platform.

Because of the availability of more than an actor and a wireless component among e-health applications, providing more security and safety is expected. Moreover, ensuring data confidentiality within different services becomes a key requirement. In this paper, we propose to collect data from health and fitness smart devices deployed in connection with the proposed IoT blockchain platform. The use of these devices helps us in extracting an amount of highly valuable heath data that are filtered, analyzed, and stored in electronic health records (EHRs). Different actors of the platform, coaches, patients, and doctors, collaborate to provide an on-time diagnosis and treatment for various diseases in an easy and cost-effective way. Our main purpose is to provide a distributed, secure, and authorized access to these sensitive data using the Ethereum blockchain technology. We have designed an integrated low-powered IoT blockchain platform for a healthcare application to store and review EHRs. This architecture, based on the blockchain Ethereum, includes a web and mobile application allowing the patient as well as the medical and paramedical staff to have a secure access to health information. The Ethereum node is implemented on an embedded platform, which should provide an efficient, flexible, and secure system despite the limited resources and low power consumption of the multiprocessor platform.

Improved Recursive DV-Hop Localization Algorithm with RSSI Measurement for Wireless Sensor Networks.

As localization represents the main backbone of several wireless sensor networks applications, several localization algorithms have been proposed in the literature. There is a growing interest in the multi-hop localization algorithms as they permit the localization of sensor nodes even if they are several hops away from anchor nodes. One of the most famous localization algorithms is the Distance Vector Hop (DV-Hop). Aiming to minimize the large localization error in the original DV-Hop algorithm, we propose an improved DV-Hop algorithm in this paper. The distance between unknown nodes and anchors is estimated using the received signal strength indication (RSSI) and the polynomial approximation. Moreover, the proposed algorithm uses a recursive computation of the localization process to improve the accuracy of position estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed localization technique minimizes the localization error and improves the localization accuracy.

An Efficient Dynamic-Decision Based Task Scheduler for Task Offloading Optimization and Energy Management in Mobile Cloud Computing.

Restricted abilities of mobile devices in terms of storage, computation, time, energy supply, and transmission causes issues related to energy optimization and time management while processing tasks on mobile phones. This issue pertains to multifarious mobile device-related dimensions, including mobile cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing. On the contrary, mobile devices' dearth of storage and processing power originates several issues for optimal energy and time management. These problems intensify the process of task retaining and offloading on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel task scheduling algorithm that addresses energy consumption and time execution by proposing an energy-efficient dynamic decision-based method. The proposed model quickly adapts to the cloud computing tasks and energy and time computation of mobile devices. Furthermore, we present a novel task scheduling server that performs the offloading computation process on the cloud, enhancing the mobile device's decision-making ability and computational performance during task offloading. The process of task scheduling harnesses the proposed empirical algorithm. The outcomes of this study enable effective task scheduling wherein energy consumption and task scheduling reduces significantly.

Source Localization of EEG Brainwaves Activities via Mother Wavelets Families for SWT Decomposition.

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a system used to communicate with an external world through the brain activity. The brain activity is measured by electroencephalography (EEG) signal and then processed by a BCI system. EEG source reconstruction could be a way to improve the accuracy of EEG classification in EEG based brain-computer interface (BCI). The source localization of the human brain activities can be an important resource for the recognition of the cognitive state, medical disorders, and a better understanding of the brain in general. In this study, we have compared 51 mother wavelets taken from 7 different wavelet families, which are applied to a Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) decomposition of an EEG signal. This process includes Haar, Symlets, Daubechies, Coiflets, Discrete Meyer, Biorthogonal, and reverse Biorthogonal wavelet families in extracting five different brainwave subbands for source localization. For this process, we used the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for feature extraction followed by the Boundary Element Model (BEM) and the Equivalent Current Dipole (ECD) for the forward and inverse problem solutions. The evaluation results in investigating the optimal mother wavelet for source localization eventually identified the sym20 mother wavelet as the best choice followed by bior6.8 and coif5.

An Empirical Study on Diabetes Depression over Distress Evaluation Using Diagnosis Statistical Manual and Chi-Square Method.

Diabetes distress is an alternative disorder that is often associated with depression syndromes. Psychosocial distress is an alternative disorder that acts as a resistance to diabetes self-care management and compromises diabetes control. Yet, in Nigeria, the focus of healthcare centers is largely inclined toward the medical aspect of diabetes that neglects psychosocial care. In this retrospective study, specific distress was measured by the Diabetes Distress Screening (DDS) scale, and depression was analyzed by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Diagnosis Statistics Manual (DSM) criteria in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients of Northwestern Nigeria. Additionally, we applied the Chi-square test and linear regression to measure the forecast prevalence ratio and evaluate the link between the respective factors that further determine the odd ratios and coefficient correlations in five nonintrusive variables, namely age, gender, physical exercise, diabetes history, and smoking. In total, 712 sample patients were taken, with 51.68% male and 47.31% female patients. The mean age and body mass index (BMI) was 48.6 years ± 12.8 and 45.6 years ± 8.3. Based on the BDI prediction, 90.15% of patients were found depressed according to the DSM parameters, and depression prevalence was recorded around 22.06%. Overall, 88.20% of patients had DDS-dependent diabetes-specific distress with a prevalence ratio of 24.08%, of whom 45.86% were moderate and 54.14% serious. In sharp contrast, emotion-related distress of 28.96% was found compared to interpersonal (23.61%), followed by physician (16.42%) and regimen (13.21%) distress. The BDI-based matching of depression signs was also statistically significant with p < 0.001 in severe distress patients. However, 10.11% of patients were considered not to be depressed by DSM guidelines. The statistical evidence indicates that depression and distress are closely correlated with age, sex, diabetes history, physical exercise, and smoking influences. The facts and findings in this work show that emotional distress was found more prevalent. This study is significant because it considered several sociocultural and religious differences between Nigeria and large, undeveloped, populated countries with low socioeconomic status and excessive epidemiological risk. Finally, it is important for the clinical implications of T2DM patients on their initial screenings.

UTM-Chain: Blockchain-Based Secure Unmanned Traffic Management for Internet of Drones.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAVs) are dramatically evolving and promoting several civil applications. However, they are still prone to many security issues that threaten public safety. Security becomes even more challenging when they are connected to the Internet as their data stream is exposed to attacks. Unmanned traffic management (UTM) represents one of the most important topics for small unmanned aerial systems for beyond-line-of-sight operations in controlled low-altitude airspace. However, without securing the flight path exchanges between drones and ground stations or control centers, serious security threats may lead to disastrous situations. For example, a predefined flight path could be easily altered to make the drone perform illegal operations. Motivated by these facts, this paper discusses the security issues for UTM's components and addresses the security requirements for such systems. Moreover, we propose UTM-Chain, a lightweight blockchain-based security solution using hyperledger fabric for UTM of low-altitude UAVs which fits the computational and storage resources limitations of UAVs. Moreover, UTM-Chain provides secure and unalterable traffic data between the UAVs and their ground control stations. The performance of the proposed system related to transaction latency and resource utilization is analyzed by using cAdvisor. Finally, the analysis of security aspects demonstrates that the proposed UTM-Chain scheme is feasible and extensible for the secure sharing of UAV data.

A Hybrid DV-Hop Algorithm Using RSSI for Localization in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks.

With the increasing realization of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and rapid proliferation of wireless sensor networks (WSN), estimating the location of wireless sensor nodes is emerging as an important issue. Traditional ranging based localization algorithms use triangulation for estimating the physical location of only those wireless nodes that are within one-hop distance from the anchor nodes. Multi-hop localization algorithms, on the other hand, aim at localizing the wireless nodes that can physically be residing at multiple hops away from anchor nodes. These latter algorithms have attracted a growing interest from research community due to the smaller number of required anchor nodes. One such algorithm, known as DV-Hop (Distance Vector Hop), has gained popularity due to its simplicity and lower cost. However, DV-Hop suffers from reduced accuracy due to the fact that it exploits only the network topology (i.e., number of hops to anchors) rather than the distances between pairs of nodes. In this paper, we propose an enhanced DV-Hop localization algorithm that also uses the RSSI values associated with links between one-hop neighbors. Moreover, we exploit already localized nodes by promoting them to become additional anchor nodes. Our simulations have shown that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the original DV-Hop localization algorithm and two of its recently published variants, namely RSSI Auxiliary Ranging and the Selective 3-Anchor DV-hop algorithm. More precisely, in some scenarios, the proposed algorithm improves the localization accuracy by almost 95%, 90% and 70% as compared to the basic DV-Hop, Selective 3-Anchor, and RSSI DV-Hop algorithms, respectively.