The greenhouse is one of the sustainable forms of smart agricultural farming. It is considered as an alternate method to overcome the food crisis which is generated due to high population growth, climate change, and environmental pollution. Although this method supports off-the-season crops within the enclosed area even in severe climatic zones. It has required to efficiently control and manage the crop parameters at greenhouse in a more precise and secure way. The advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced smart solutions to automate the greenhouse farming parameters such as plant monitoring, internal atmosphere control, and irrigation control. The survey presents a hierarchy on the major components of IoT-based greenhouse farming. A rigorous discussion on greenhouse farming techniques, IoT-based greenhouse categories, network technologies (cloud/edge computing, IoT protocols, data analytics, sensors) has been presented. Furthermore, a detailed discussion on mobile-based greenhouse applications and IoT applications has been presented to manage the greenhouse farm. Moreover, the success stories and statistical analysis of some agricultural countries have been presented to standardize the IoT-based greenhouse farming. Lastly, the open issues and research challenges related to IoT-enabled greenhouse farming has been presented with state-of-the-art future research directions.

Elections and voting play a crucial role in the development of a democratic society, enabling the public to express their views and participate in the decision-making process. Voting methods have evolved from paper ballot systems to e-voting systems to preserve the integrity of votes, ensuring a secure, transparent, and verifiable process. Continuous efforts have been made to develop a secure e-voting system that eliminates fraud attempts and provides accurate voting results. In this paper, we propose the architecture of a blockchain-based e-voting system called VoteChain. Developed to support the existing voting system in the state of Palestine, VoteChain aims to provide secure e-voting with features such as auditability, verifiability, accuracy, privacy, flexibility, transparency, mobility, availability, convenience, data integrity, and distribution of authority. The work introduces a smart contract designed to meet the demands of e-voting, governing transactions, monitoring computations, enforcing acceptable usage policies, and managing data usage after transmission. The proposed system also adopts advanced cryptographic techniques to enhance security. VoteChain features a web-based interface to facilitate user interaction, providing protection against multiple or double voting to ensure the integrity of the election. Furthermore, VoteChain is designed with a user-friendly and easily accessible administrator interface for managing voters, constituencies, and candidates. It ensures equal participation rights for all voters, fostering fair and healthy competition among candidates while preserving voter anonymity. A comparative analysis demonstrates VoteChain’s advancements in privacy, security, and scalability over both traditional and blockchain-based e-voting systems.

Research publications are reaching a stunning growth rate. Therefore, new challenges regarding managing the peer-review activities are presented, such as data security, privacy, integrity, fragmentation, and isolation. Further, because of the emergence of predatory journals and research fraud, there is a need to assess the quality of the peer-review process. This research proposes a fully functional blockchain-based editorial management system, namely, TimedChain, for managing the peer-review process from submission to publication. TimedChain provides secure, interoperable, transparent, and efficient access to manuscripts by publishers, authors, readers, and other third parties. Time-based smart contracts and advanced encryption techniques are employed for governing transactions, controlling access, and providing further security. An incentive mechanism that evaluates publishers’ value respecting their efforts at managing and maintaining research data and creating new blocks is introduced. Extensive experiments were conducted for performance evaluation. Results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system in governing a large set of data at low latency.

Heterogeneous vehicular communication on the Internet of connected vehicle (IoV) environment is an emerging research theme toward achieving smart transportation. It is an evolution of the existing vehicular ad hoc network architecture due to the increasingly heterogeneous nature of the various existing networks in road traffic environments that need to be integrated. The existing literature on vehicular communication is lacking in the area of network optimization for heterogeneous network environments. In this context, this paper proposes a heterogeneous network model for IoV and service-oriented network optimization. The network model focuses on three key networking entities: vehicular cloud, heterogeneous communication, and smart use cases as clients. Most traffic-related data–oriented computations are performed at cloud servers for making intelligent decisions. The connection component enables handoff-centric network communication in heterogeneous vehicular environments. The use-case-oriented smart traffic services are implemented as clients for the network model. The model is tested for various service-oriented metrics in heterogeneous vehicular communication environments with the aim of affirming several service benefits. Future challenges and issues in heterogeneous IoV environments are also highlighted.

The violation traffic laws by driving at high speeds, the overloading of passengers, and the unfastening of seatbelts are of high risk and can be fatal in the event of any accident. Several systems have been proposed to improve passenger safety, and the systems either use the sensor-based approach or the computer-vision-based approach. However, the accuracy of these systems still needs enhancement because the entire road network is not covered; the approaches utilize complex estimation techniques, and they are significantly influenced by the surrounding environment, such as the weather and physical obstacles. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel IoT-based traffic violation monitoring system that accurately estimates the vehicle speed, counts the number of passengers, and detects the seatbelt status on the entire road network. The system also utilizes edge computing, fog computing, and cloud computing technologies to achieve high accuracy. The system is evaluated using real-life experiments and compared with another system where the edge and cloud layers are used without the fog layer. The results show that adding a fog layer improves the monitoring accuracy as the accuracy of passenger counting rises from 94% to 97%, the accuracy of seatbelt detection rises from 95% to 99%, and the root mean square error of speed estimation is reduced from 2.64 to 1.87.