Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are among the most popular wireless technologies for sensor communication purposes nowadays. Usually, WSNs are developed for specific applications, either monitoring purposes or tracking purposes, for indoor or outdoor environments, where limited battery power is a main challenge. To overcome this problem, many routing protocols have been proposed through the last few years. Nevertheless, the extension of the network lifetime in consideration of the sensors capacities remains an open issue. In this paper, to achieve more efficient and reliable protocols according to current application scenarios, two well-known energy efficient protocols, i.e., Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and Energy–Efficient Sensor Routing (EESR), are redesigned considering neural networks. Specifically, to improve results in terms of energy efficiency, a Levenberg–Marquardt neural network (LMNN) is integrated. Furthermore, in order to improve the performance, a sub-cluster LEACH-derived protocol is also proposed. Simulation results show that the Sub-LEACH with LMNN outperformed its competitors in energy efficiency. In addition, the end-to-end delay was evaluated, and Sub-LEACH protocol proved to be the best among existing strategies. Moreover, an intrusion detection system (IDS) has been proposed for anomaly detection based on the support vector machine (SVM) approach for optimal feature selection. Results showed a 96.15% accuracy—again outperforming existing IDS models. Therefore, satisfactory results in terms of energy efficiency, end-to-end delay and anomaly detection analysis were attained.

Docker containers are the lightweight-virtualization technology prevailing today for the provision of microservices. This work raises and discusses two main challenges in Docker containers’ scheduling in cloud-fog-internet of things (IoT) networks. First, the convenience to integrate intelligent containers’ schedulers based on soft-computing in the dominant open-source containers’ management platforms: Docker Swarm, Google Kubernetes and Apache Mesos. Secondly, the need for specific intelligent containers’ schedulers for the different interfaces in cloud-fog-IoT networks: cloud-to-fog, fog-to-IoT and cloud-to-fog. The goal of this work is to support the optimal allocation of microservices provided by the main cloud service providers today and used by millions of users worldwide in applications such as smart health, content delivery networks, smart health, etc. Particularly, the improvement is studied in terms of quality of service (QoS) parameters such as latency, load balance, energy consumption and runtime, based on the analysis of previous works and implementations. Moreover, the scientific-technical impact of smart containers’ scheduling in the market is also discussed, showing the possible repercussion of the raised opportunities in the research line.

This work proposes the use of bio-inspired knowledge acquisition for Fuzzy Systems founded on Swarm Intelligence-Particle Swarm Optimization (SI-PSO). Swarm-based models consider knowledge entities as particles that move in the space to reach the higher quality. Fuzzy Systems following SI-PSO for knowledge acquisition are categorized in this work as Swarm Fuzzy Systems (SFSs). Specifically, two learning methodologies, KASIA (using rule bases as particles in PSO) and KARP (using rules as particles in PSO) are introduced. SFSs performance is studied in a problem of practical importance nowadays with data sets, the learning of fuzzy meta-schedulers in computational grids. Fuzzy meta-schedulers are Fuzzy Systems doing intelligent allocation of jobs to improve the performance of the grid, such as the reduction of the execution time of workload. The scheduling decisions are taken based on the knowledge of the Fuzzy System and in this way, the relevance of their learning process are critical. In this work, compared results of the performance of the different SFSs and a comparison between SFSs and Genetic Fuzzy Systems are presented. Simulations results show that SFSs can achieve a faster convergence and higher quality with a reduced number of control parameters what makes them a good alternative to Genetic Fuzzy Systems.