Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are mainly characterized by their limited and non-replenishable energy supply. Hence, the need for energy efficient infrastructure is becoming increasingly more important since it impacts upon the network operational lifetime. Sensor node clustering is one of the techniques that can expand the lifespan of the whole network through data aggregation at the cluster head. In this paper, we present an energy-aware clustering for wireless sensor networks using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm which is implemented at the base station. We define a new cost function, with the objective of simultaneously minimizing the intra-cluster distance and optimizing the energy consumption of the network. The performance of our protocol is compared with the well known cluster-based protocol developed for WSNs, LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) and LEACH-C, the later being an improved version of LEACH. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol can achieve better network lifetime and data delivery at the base station over its comparatives.

The incorporation of the cloud technology with the Internet of Things (IoT) is significant in order to obtain better performance for a seamless, continuous, and ubiquitous framework. IoT has many applications in the healthcare sector, one of these applications is voice pathology monitoring. Unfortunately, voice pathology has not gained much attention, where there is an urgent need in this area due to the shortage of research and diagnosis of lethal diseases. Most of the researchers are focusing on the voice pathology and their finding is only to differentiating either the voice is normal (healthy) or pathological voice, where there is a lack of the current studies for detecting a certain disease such as laryngeal cancer. In this paper, we present an extensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques and studies of IoT frameworks and machine learning algorithms used in the healthcare in general and in the voice pathology surveillance systems in particular. Furthermore, this paper also presents applications, challenges and key issues of both IoT and machine learning algorithms in the healthcare. Finally, this paper highlights some open issues of IoT in healthcare that warrant further research and investigation in order to present an easy, comfortable and effective diagnosis and treatment of disease for both patients and doctors.

In the last decade, the implementation of machine learning algorithms in the analysis of voice disorder is paramount in order to provide a non-invasive voice pathology detection by only using audio signal. In spite of that, most recent systems of voice pathology work on a limited acoustic database. In other words, the systems use one vowel, such as /a/, and ignore sentences and other vowels when analyzing the audio signal. Other key issues that should be considered in the systems are accuracy and time consumption of an algorithm. Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (OSELM) is one of the machine learning algorithms that can be regarded as a rapid and accurate algorithm in the classification process. Therefore, this paper presents a voice pathology detection and classification system by using OSELM algorithm as a classifier, and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) as a featured extraction. In this work, the voice samples were taken from the Saarbrücken voice database (SVD). This system involves two parts of the database; the first part includes all voices in SVD with sentences and vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/, which are uttered in high, low, and normal pitches; and the second part utilizes voice samples of the common three types of pathologies (cyst, polyp, and paralysis) based on the vowel /a/ that is produced in normal pitch. The experimental results have shown that OSELM was able to achieve the highest accuracy up to 91.17%, 94% of precision, and 91% of recall. Furthermore, OSELM obtained 87%, 87.55%, and 97.67% for f-measure, G-mean, and specificity, respectively. The proposed system also presents a high ability to achieve detection and classification results in real-time clinical applications.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new type of technology that embraces high flexibility and adaptability. The applications in SDN have the ability to manage and control networks while ensuring load balancing, access control, and routing. These are considered the most significant benefits of SDN. However, SDN can be influenced by several types of conflicting flows which may lead to deterioration in network performance in terms of efficiency and optimisation. Besides, SDN conflicts occur due to the impact and adjustment of certain features such as priority and action. Moreover, applying machine learning algorithms in the identification and classification of conflicting flows has limitations. As a result, this paper presents several machine learning algorithms that include Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extremely Fast Decision Tree (EFDT) and Hybrid (DT-SVM) for detecting and classifying conflicting flows in SDNs. The EFDT and hybrid DT-SVM algorithms were designed and deployed based on DT and SVM algorithms to achieve improved performance. Using a range flows from 1000 to 100000 with an increment of 10000 flows per step in two network topologies namely, Fat Tree and Simple Tree Topologies, that were created using the Mininet simulator and connected to the Ryu controller, the performance of the proposed algorithms was evaluated for efficiency and effectiveness across a variety of evaluation metrics. The experimental results of the detection of conflict flows show that the DT and SVM algorithms achieve accuracies of 99.27% and 98.53% respectively while the EFDT and hybrid DT-SVM algorithms achieve respective accuracies of 99.49% and 99.27%. In addition, the proposed EFDT algorithm achieves 95.73% accuracy on the task of classification between conflict flow types. The proposed EFDT and hybrid DT-SVM algorithms show a high capability of SDN applications to offer fast detection and classification of conflict flows.

Clustering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the techniques that can expand the lifetime of the whole network through data aggregation at the cluster head. This paper presents performance comparison between particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithms (GA) with a new cost function that has the objective of simultaneously minimizing the intra-cluster distance and optimizing the energy consumption of the network. Furthermore, a comparison is made with the well known cluster-based protocols developed for WSNs, LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) and LEACH-C, the later being an improved version of LEACH, as well as the traditional K-means clustering algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol using PSO algorithm has higher efficiency and can achieve better network lifetime and data delivery at the base station over its comparatives.

Software defined network (SDN) is a network architecture in which the network traffic may be operated and managed dynamically according to user requirements and demands. Issue of security is one of the big challenges of SDN because different attacks may affect performance and these attacks can be classified into different types. One of the famous attacks is distributed denial of service (DDoS). SDN is a new networking approach that is introduced with the goal to simplify the network management by separating the data and control planes. However, the separation leads to the emergence of new types of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on SDN networks. The centralized role of the controller in SDN makes it a perfect target for the attackers. Such attacks can easily bring down the entire network by bringing down the controller. This research explains DDoS attacks and the anomaly detection as one of the famous detection techniques for intelligent networks.