The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology and their integration in smart cities have changed the way we work and live, and enriched our society. However, IoT technologies present several challenges such as increases in energy consumption, and produces toxic pollution as well as E-waste in smart cities. Smart city applications must be environmentally-friendly, hence require a move towards green IoT. Green IoT leads to an eco-friendly environment, which is more sustainable for smart cities. Therefore, it is essential to address the techniques and strategies for reducing pollution hazards, traffic waste, resource usage, energy consumption, providing public safety, life quality, and sustaining the environment and cost management. This survey focuses on providing a comprehensive review of the techniques and strategies for making cities smarter, sustainable, and eco-friendly. Furthermore, the survey focuses on IoT and its capabilities to merge into aspects of potential to address the needs of smart cities. Finally, we discuss challenges and opportunities for future research in smart city applications.

When integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) occurred, tens of applications including smart agriculture have emerged to offer innovative solutions to modernize the farming sector. This paper aims to present a low-cost platform for comprehensive environmental parameter monitoring using flying IoT. This platform is deployed and tested in a real scenario on a farm in Medenine, Tunisia, in the period of March 2020 to March 2021. The experimental work fulfills the requirements of automated and real-time monitoring of the environmental parameters using both under- and aboveground sensors. These IoT sensors are on a farm collecting vast amounts of environmental data, where it is sent to ground gateways every 1 h, after which the obtained data is collected and transmitted by a drone to the cloud for storage and analysis every 12 h. This low-cost platform can help farmers, governmental, or manufacturers to predict environmental data over the geographically large farm field, which leads to enhancement in crop productivity and farm management in a cost-effective, and timely manner. Obtained experimental results infer that automated and human-made sets of actions can be applied and/or suggested, due to the innovative integration between IoT sensors with the drone. These smart actions help in precision agriculture, which, in turn, intensely boost crop productivity, saving natural resources.

It can be challenging for doctors to identify eye disorders early enough using fundus pictures. Diagnosing ocular illnesses by hand is time-consuming, error-prone, and complicated. Therefore, an automated ocular disease detection system with computer-aided tools is necessary to detect various eye disorders using fundus pictures. Such a system is now possible as a consequence of deep learning algorithms that have improved image classification capabilities. A deep-learning-based approach to targeted ocular detection is presented in this study. For this study, we used state-of-the-art image classification algorithms, such as VGG-19, to classify the ODIR dataset, which contains 5000 images of eight different classes of the fundus. These classes represent different ocular diseases. However, the dataset within these classes is highly unbalanced. To resolve this issue, the work suggested converting this multiclass classification problem into a binary classification problem and taking the same number of images for both classifications. Then, the binary classifications were trained with VGG-19. The accuracy of the VGG-19 model was 98.13% for the normal (N) versus pathological myopia (M) class; the model reached an accuracy of 94.03% for normal (N) versus cataract (C), and the model provided an accuracy of 90.94% for normal (N) versus glaucoma (G). All of the other models also improve the accuracy when the data is balanced.

Nowadays, IoT technology is used in various application domains, including the healthcare, where sensors and IoT enabled medical devices exchange data without human interaction to securely transmit collected sensitive healthcare data towards healthcare professionals to be reviewed and take proper actions if needed. The IoT devices are usually resource‐constrained in terms of energy consumption, storage capacity, computational capability, and communication range. In healthcare applications, many miniaturized devices are exploited for healthcare data collection and transmission. Thus, there is a need for secure data aggregation while preserving the data integrity and privacy of the patient. For that, the security, privacy, and aggregation of health data are very important aspects to be considered. This paper proposes a novel secure data aggregation scheme called “An Efficient and Privacy‐Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme with authentication for IoT‐Based Healthcare applications” (EPPDA). EPPDA is based to verification and authorization phase to verify the legitimacy of the nodes that need to join the process of aggregation. EPPDA, also, uses additive homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy and combines it with homomorphic MAC to check the data integrity. The major advantage of homomorphic encryption is allowing complex mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data without knowing the contents of the original plain data. The proposed system is developed using MySignals HW V2 platform. Security analysis and experimental results show that our proposed scheme guarantees data privacy, messages authenticity, and integrity, with lightweight communication overhead and computation.

Nowadays, the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis has attracted major attention within both the academic literature and industrial sector. AI would include deep learning (DL) models, where these models have been achieving a spectacular performance in healthcare applications. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2020 there were around 25.6 million people who died from cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Thus, this paper aims to shad the light on cardiology since it is widely considered as one of the most important in medicine field. The paper develops an efficient DL model for automatic diagnosis of 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals with 27 classes, including 26 types of CVD and a normal sinus rhythm. The proposed model consists of Residual Neural Network (ResNet-50). An experimental work has been conducted using combined public databases from the USA, China, and Germany as a proof-of-concept. Simulation results of the proposed model have achieved an accuracy of 97.63% and a precision of 89.67%. The achieved results are validated against the actual values in the recent literature.

Disasters, either manmade or natural, call for rapid and timely actions. Due to disaster, all of the communication infrastructures are destroyed, and there is no way for connection between people in disaster and others outside the disaster range. Drone technology is the critical technology for delivering communication services and guiding people and monitoring the unwanted effects of a disaster. The collaboration of advanced technologies can reduce life losses, save people’s lives, and manage the disaster crisis. The network performance of collaboration between the Internet of Things (IoT) and drone edge intelligence can help gather and process data, extend the wireless coverage area, deliver medical emergencies, provide real‐time information about the emergency, and gather data from areas that are impossible for humans to reach. In this paper, we focus on the network performance for efficient collaboration of drone edge intelligence and smart wearable devices for disaster management. We focus mainly on network connectivity parameters for improving real‐time data sharing between the drone edge intelligence and smart wearable devices. The relevant parameters that are considered in this study include delay, throughput, and the load from drone edge intelligence. It is further shown that network performance can have significant improvement when the abovementioned parameters are correctly optimised, and the improved performance can significantly improve the guiding/coordinating of search and rescue (SAR) teams effectively and efficiently.