A sustainable and secure load management model for green cloud data centres.

The massive upsurge in cloud resource demand and inefficient load management stave off the sustainability of Cloud Data Centres (CDCs) resulting in high energy consumption, resource contention, excessive carbon emission, and security threats. In this context, a novel Sustainable and Secure Load Management (SaS-LM) Model is proposed to enhance the security for users with sustainability for CDCs. The model estimates and reserves the required resources viz., compute, network, and storage and dynamically adjust the load subject to maximum security and sustainability. An evolutionary optimization algorithm named Dual-Phase Black Hole Optimization (DPBHO) is proposed for optimizing a multi-layered feed-forward neural network and allowing the model to estimate resource usage and detect probable congestion. Further, DPBHO is extended to a Multi-objective DPBHO algorithm for a secure and sustainable VM allocation and management to minimize the number of active server machines, carbon emission, and resource wastage for greener CDCs. SaS-LM is implemented and evaluated using benchmark real-world Google Cluster VM traces. The proposed model is compared with state-of-the-arts which reveals its efficacy in terms of reduced carbon emission and energy consumption up to 46.9% and 43.9%, respectively with improved resource utilization up to 16.5%.

Artificial Intelligence Applications and Self-Learning 6G Networks for Smart Cities Digital Ecosystems: Taxonomy, Challenges, and Future Directions.

The recent upsurge of smart cities' applications and their building blocks in terms of the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), federated and distributed learning, big data analytics, blockchain, and edge-cloud computing has urged the design of the upcoming 6G network generation, due to their stringent requirements in terms of the quality of services (QoS), availability, and dependability to satisfy a Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) for the end users. Industries and academia have started to design 6G networks and propose the use of AI in its protocols and operations. Published papers on the topic discuss either the requirements of applications via a top-down approach or the network requirements in terms of agility, performance, and energy saving using a down-top perspective. In contrast, this paper adopts a holistic outlook, considering the applications, the middleware, the underlying technologies, and the 6G network systems towards an intelligent and integrated computing, communication, coordination, and decision-making ecosystem. In particular, we discuss the temporal evolution of the wireless network generations' development to capture the applications, middleware, and technological requirements that led to the development of the network generation systems from 1G to AI-enabled 6G and its employed self-learning models. We provide a taxonomy of the technology-enabled smart city applications' systems and present insights into those systems for the realization of a trustworthy and efficient smart city ecosystem. We propose future research directions in 6G networks for smart city applications.

A drone-based networked system and methods for combating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. It is similar to influenza viruses and raises concerns through alarming levels of spread and severity resulting in an ongoing pandemic worldwide. Within eight months (by August 2020), it infected 24.0 million persons worldwide and over 824 thousand have died. Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are very helpful in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. This work investigates the drone-based systems, COVID-19 pandemic situations, and proposes an architecture for handling pandemic situations in different scenarios using real-time and simulation-based scenarios. The proposed architecture uses wearable sensors to record the observations in Body Area Networks (BANs) in a push-pull data fetching mechanism. The proposed architecture is found to be useful in remote and highly congested pandemic areas where either the wireless or Internet connectivity is a major issue or chances of COVID-19 spreading are high. It collects and stores the substantial amount of data in a stipulated period and helps to take appropriate action as and when required. In real-time drone-based healthcare system implementation for COVID-19 operations, it is observed that a large area can be covered for sanitization, thermal image collection, and patient identification within a short period (2 KMs within 10 min approx.) through aerial route. In the simulation, the same statistics are observed with an addition of collision-resistant strategies working successfully for indoor and outdoor healthcare operations. Further, open challenges are identified and promising research directions are highlighted.

CONFRONT: Cloud-fog-dew based monitoring framework for COVID-19 management.

In the recent times, the IoT (Internet of Things) enabled devices and applications have seen a rapid growth in various sectors including healthcare. The ability of low-cost connected sensors to cover large areas makes it a potential tool in the fight against pandemics, like COVID-19. The COVID-19 has posed a formidable challenge for the developing countries, like India, which need to cater to large population base with limited health infrastructure. In this paper, we proposed a  Cloud-fog-dew based mOnitoriNg Framework foR cOvid-19 maNagemenT, called CONFRONT. This cloud-fog-dew based healthcare model may help in preliminary diagnosis and also in monitoring patients while they are in quarantine facilities or home based treatments. The fog architecture ensures that the model is suited for real-time scenarios while keeping the bandwidth requirements low. To analyse large scale COVID-19 statistics data for extracting aggregate information of the disease spread, the cloud servers are leveraged due to its scalable computational and storage capabilities. The dew architecture ensures that the application is available at a limited scale even when cloud connectivity is lost, leading to a faster uptime for the application. A low cost wearable device consisting of heterogeneous sensors has also been designed and fabricated to realize the proposed framework.

A Privacy-Preserving Mobile and Fog Computing Framework to Trace and Prevent COVID-19 Community Transmission.

To slow down the spread of COVID-19, governments worldwide are trying to identify infected people, and contain the virus by enforcing isolation, and quarantine. However, it is difficult to trace people who came into contact with an infected person, which causes widespread community transmission, and mass infection. To address this problem, we develop an e-government Privacy-Preserving Mobile, and Fog computing framework entitled PPMF that can trace infected, and suspected cases nationwide. We use personal mobile devices with contact tracing app, and two types of stationary fog nodes, named Automatic Risk Checkers (ARC), and Suspected User Data Uploader Node (SUDUN), to trace community transmission alongside maintaining user data privacy. Each user's mobile device receives a Unique Encrypted Reference Code (UERC) when registering on the central application. The mobile device, and the central application both generate Rotational Unique Encrypted Reference Code (RUERC), which broadcasted using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The ARCs are placed at the entry points of buildings, which can immediately detect if there are positive or suspected cases nearby. If any confirmed case is found, the ARCs broadcast pre-cautionary messages to nearby people without revealing the identity of the infected person. The SUDUNs are placed at the health centers that report test results to the central cloud application. The reported data is later used to map between infected, and suspected cases. Therefore, using our proposed PPMF framework, governments can let organizations continue their economic activities without complete lockdown.

The Virtual Kidney: an eScience interface and Grid portal.

The Virtual Kidney uses a web interface and distributed computing to provide experimental scientists and analysts with access to computational simulations and knowledge databases hosted in geographically separated laboratories. Users can explore a variety of complex models without requiring the specific programming environment in which applications have been developed. This initiative exploits high-bandwidth communication networks for collaborative research and for shared access to knowledge resources. The Virtual Kidney has been developed within a specialist community of renal scientists but is transferable to other areas of research requiring interaction between published literature and databases, theoretical models and simulations and the formulation of effective experimental designs. A web-based three-dimensional interface provides access to experimental data, a parameter database and mathematical models. A multi-scale kidney reconstruction includes blood vessels and serially sectioned nephrons. Selection of structures provides links to the database, returning parameter values and extracts from the literature. Models are run locally or remotely with a Grid resource broker managing scheduling, monitoring and visualization of simulation results and application, credential and resource allocation. Simulation results are viewed graphically or as scaled colour gradients on the Virtual Kidney structures, allowing visual and quantitative appreciation of the effects of simulated parameter changes.