AutoBar: Automatic Barrier Coverage Formation for Danger Keep Out Applications in Smart City.

Barrier coverage is a fundamental application in wireless sensor networks, which are widely used for smart cities. In applications, the sensors form a barrier for the intruders and protect an area through intrusion detection. In this paper, we study a new branch of barrier coverage, namely warning barrier coverage (WBC). Different from the classic barrier coverage, WBC has the inverse protect direction, which moves the sensors surrounding a dangerous region and protects any unexpected visitors by warning them away from the dangers. WBC holds a promising prospect in many danger keep out applications for smart cities. For example, a WBC can enclose the debris area in the sea and alarm any approaching ships in order to avoid their damaging propellers. One special feature of WBC is that the target region is usually dangerous and its boundary is previously unknown. Hence, the scattered mobile nodes need to detect the boundary and form the barrier coverage themselves. It is challenging to form these distributed sensor nodes into a barrier because a node can sense only the local information and there is no global information of the unknown region or other nodes. To this end, in response to the newly proposed issue of the formation of barrier cover, we propose a novel solution AutoBar for mobile sensor nodes to automatically form a WBC for smart cities. Notably, this is the first work to trigger the coverage problem of the alarm barrier, wherein the regional information is not pre-known. To pursue the high coverage quality, we theoretically derive the optimal distribution pattern of sensor nodes using convex theory. Based on the analysis, we design a fully distributed algorithm that enables nodes to collaboratively move toward the optimal distribution pattern. In addition, AutoBar is able to reorganize the barrier even if any node is broken. To validate the feasibility of AutoBar, we develop the prototype of the specialized mobile node, which consists of two kinds of sensors: one for boundary detection and another for visitor detection. Based on the prototype, we conduct extensive real trace-driven simulations in various smart city scenarios. Performance results demonstrate that AutoBar outperforms the existing barrier coverage strategies in terms of coverage quality, formation duration, and communication overhead.

Edge Based Priority-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation for Internet of Things Networks.

The exponential growth of the edge-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) services and its ecosystems has recently led to a new type of communication network, the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN). This standard enables low-power, long-range, and low-data-rate communications. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a recent standard of LPWAN that incorporates LoRa wireless into a networked infrastructure. Consequently, the consumption of smart End Devices (EDs) is a major challenge due to the highly dense network environment characterised by limited battery life, spectrum coverage, and data collisions. Intelligent and efficient service provisioning is an urgent need of a network to streamline the networks and solve these problems. This paper proposes a Dynamic Reinforcement Learning Resource Allocation (DRLRA) approach to allocate efficient resources such as channel, Spreading Factor (SF), and Transmit Power (Tp) to EDs that ultimately improve the performance in terms of consumption and reliability. The proposed model is extensively simulated and evaluated with the currently implemented algorithms such as Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) and Adaptive Priority-aware Resource Allocation (APRA) using standard and advanced evaluation metrics. The proposed work is properly cross validated to show completely unbiased results.

Data Analytics, Self-Organization, and Security Provisioning for Smart Monitoring Systems.

Internet availability and its integration with smart technologies have favored everyday objects and things and offered new areas, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT refers to a concept where smart devices or things are connected and create a network. This new area has suffered from big data handling and security issues. There is a need to design a data analytics model by using new 5G technologies, architecture, and a security model. Reliable data communication in the presence of legitimate nodes is always one of the challenges in these networks. Malicious nodes are generating inaccurate information and breach the user's security. In this paper, a data analytics model and self-organizing architecture for IoT networks are proposed to understand the different layers of technologies and processes. The proposed model is designed for smart environmental monitoring systems. This paper also proposes a security model based on an authentication, detection, and prediction mechanism for IoT networks. The proposed model enhances security and protects the network from DoS and DDoS attacks. The proposed model evaluates in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity by using machine learning algorithms.

Prediction of global spread of COVID-19 pandemic: a review and research challenges.

Since the initial reports of the Coronavirus surfacing in Wuhan, China, the novel virus currently without a cure has spread like wildfire across the globe, the virus spread exponentially across all inhabited continent, catching local governments by surprise in many cases and bringing the world economy to a standstill. As local authorities work on a response to deal with the virus, the scientific community has stepped in to help analyze and predict the pattern and conditions that would influence the spread of this unforgiving virus. Using existing statistical modeling tools to the latest artificial intelligence technology, the scientific community has used public and privately available data to help with predictions. A lot of this data research has enabled local authorities to plan their response-whether that is to deploy tightly available medical resources like ventilators or how and when to enforce policies to social distance, including lockdowns. On the one hand, this paper shows what accuracy of research brings to enable fighting this disease; while on the other hand, it also shows what lack of response from local authorities can do in spreading this virus. This is our attempt to compile different research methods and comparing their accuracy in predicting the spread of COVID-19.

Novel metaheuristic based on multiverse theory for optimization problems in emerging systems.

Finding an optimal solution for emerging cyber physical systems (CPS) for better efficiency and robustness is one of the major issues. Meta-heuristic is emerging as a promising field of study for solving various optimization problems applicable to different CPS systems. In this paper, we propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm based on Multiverse Theory, named MVA, that can solve NP-hard optimization problems such as non-linear and multi-level programming problems as well as applied optimization problems for CPS systems. MVA algorithm inspires the creation of the next population to be very close to the solution of initial population, which mimics the nature of parallel worlds in multiverse theory. Additionally, MVA distributes the solutions in the feasible region similarly to the nature of big bangs. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, a set of test problems is implemented and measured in terms of feasibility, efficiency of their solutions and the number of iterations taken in finding the optimum solution. Numerical results obtained from extensive simulations have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches while solving the optimization problems with large feasible regions.

A Smartphone Enabled Approach to Manage COVID-19 Lockdown and Economic Crisis.

The emergence of novel COVID-19 causes an over-load in health system and high mortality rate. The key priority is to contain the epidemic and prevent the infection rate. In this context, many countries are now in some degree of lockdown to ensure extreme social distancing of entire population and hence slowing down the epidemic spread. Furthermore, authorities use case quarantine strategy and manual second/third contact-tracing to contain the COVID-19 disease. However, manual contact-tracing is time-consuming and labor-intensive task which tremendously over-load public health systems. In this paper, we developed a smartphone-based approach to automatically and widely trace the contacts for confirmed COVID-19 cases. Particularly, contact-tracing approach creates a list of individuals in the vicinity and notifying contacts or officials of confirmed COVID-19 cases. This approach is not only providing awareness to individuals they are in the proximity to the infected area, but also tracks the incidental contacts that the COVID-19 carrier might not recall. Thereafter, we developed a dashboard to provide a plan for policymakers on how lockdown/mass quarantine can be safely lifted, and hence tackling the economic crisis. The dashboard used to predict the level of lockdown area based on collected positions and distance measurements of the registered users in the vicinity. The prediction model uses k-means algorithm as an unsupervised machine learning technique for lockdown management.

COVID-19 Optimizer Algorithm, Modeling and Controlling of Coronavirus Distribution Process.

The emergence of novel COVID-19 is causing an overload on public health sector and a high fatality rate. The key priority is to contain the epidemic and reduce the infection rate. It is imperative to stress on ensuring extreme social distancing of the entire population and hence slowing down the epidemic spread. So, there is a need for an efficient optimizer algorithm that can solve NP-hard in addition to applied optimization problems. This article first proposes a novel COVID-19 optimizer Algorithm (CVA) to cover almost all feasible regions of the optimization problems. We also simulate the coronavirus distribution process in several countries around the globe. Then, we model a coronavirus distribution process as an optimization problem to minimize the number of COVID-19 infected countries and hence slow down the epidemic spread. Furthermore, we propose three scenarios to solve the optimization problem using most effective factors in the distribution process. Simulation results show one of the controlling scenarios outperforms the others. Extensive simulations using several optimization schemes show that the CVA technique performs best with up to 15%, 37%, 53% and 59% increase compared with Volcano Eruption Algorithm (VEA), Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), respectively.

An adaptive handover prediction scheme for seamless mobility based wireless networks.

We propose an adaptive handover prediction (AHP) scheme for seamless mobility based wireless networks. That is, the AHP scheme incorporates fuzzy logic with AP prediction process in order to lend cognitive capability to handover decision making. Selection metrics, including received signal strength, mobile node relative direction towards the access points in the vicinity, and access point load, are collected and considered inputs of the fuzzy decision making system in order to select the best preferable AP around WLANs. The obtained handover decision which is based on the calculated quality cost using fuzzy inference system is also based on adaptable coefficients instead of fixed coefficients. In other words, the mean and the standard deviation of the normalized network prediction metrics of fuzzy inference system, which are collected from available WLANs are obtained adaptively. Accordingly, they are applied as statistical information to adjust or adapt the coefficients of membership functions. In addition, we propose an adjustable weight vector concept for input metrics in order to cope with the continuous, unpredictable variation in their membership degrees. Furthermore, handover decisions are performed in each MN independently after knowing RSS, direction toward APs, and AP load. Finally, performance evaluation of the proposed scheme shows its superiority compared with representatives of the prediction approaches.

Advanced mobility handover for mobile IPv6 based wireless networks.

We propose an Advanced Mobility Handover scheme (AMH) in this paper for seamless mobility in MIPv6-based wireless networks. In the proposed scheme, the mobile node utilizes a unique home IPv6 address developed to maintain communication with other corresponding nodes without a care-of-address during the roaming process. The IPv6 address for each MN during the first round of AMH process is uniquely identified by HA using the developed MN-ID field as a global permanent, which is identifying uniquely the IPv6 address of MN. Moreover, a temporary MN-ID is generated by access point each time an MN is associated with a particular AP and temporarily saved in a developed table inside the AP. When employing the AMH scheme, the handover process in the network layer is performed prior to its default time. That is, the mobility handover process in the network layer is tackled by a trigger developed AMH message to the next access point. Thus, a mobile node keeps communicating with the current access point while the network layer handover is executed by the next access point. The mathematical analyses and simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better as compared with the existing approaches.