The Industrial Metaverse paradigm can be broadly described as a virtual environment that integrates various technologies such as augmented reality and mixed reality to enhance business operations and processes. It aims to streamline workflows, reduce error rates, improve efficiency, and provide a more engaging experience for employees. The promise of the Industrial Metaverse to drive sustainability and resource efficiency is compelling. Using advanced technologies such as the Industrial Metaverse is vital in an endeavor to have a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving business environment. However, the environmental impact of the technologies underpinning the Industrial Metaverse, like data centers and network infrastructure, should not be overlooked. The ecological footprint of these technologies must be considered in the sustainability equation. Researchers have warned that, by 2025, without sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) practices, AI will consume more energy than the human workforce, significantly offsetting zero carbon gains. As the Metaverse persists in evolving and gaining momentum, it will be necessary for companies to prioritize sustainability and explore new ways to balance technological advancements with environmental stewardship. However, recent studies have conjectured that the Metaverse holds the potential to reduce carbon emissions, as digital replacements for physical goods become more prevalent and physical activities like mobility and construction are reduced. Moreover, the specific extent to which this substitution can alleviate environmental concerns remains an open issue, presenting a knowledge gap in understanding the real-world impact of digital replacements. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the Industrial Metaverse, as well as explore the environmental impact of the Industrial Metaverse. The integrative literature review design and methodological approach involved multiple sources from the Web of Science and databases such as the ACM library, IEEE Library, and Google Scholar, which were analyzed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the developments in the Industrial Metaverse. Firstly, by considering the Industrial Metaverse’s architecture, we elucidate the Industrial Metaverse concept and the associated enabling technologies. Secondly, we performed an exploration through a discussion of the prevalent use cases and the deployment of the emerging Industrial Metaverse. Thirdly, we explored the impact of the Industrial Metaverse on the environment. Lastly, we address novel security and privacy risks, as well as upcoming research challenges, keeping in mind that the Industrial Metaverse is based on a strong data fabric. The results point to the Industrial Metaverse as having both positive and negative environmental effects in terms of energy consumption, e-waste, and pollution. Research, however, indicates that most Industrial Metaverse applications have a positive environmental impact and subsequently trend toward sustainability. Finally, for sustainability in the Industrial Metaverse, enterprises may consider utilizing renewable energy sources and cloud services. Furthermore, we examined the effects of products on the environment, as well as in the creation of a circular economy.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an innovative concept that segments the network into three planes: a control plane comprising of one or multiple controllers; a data plane responsible for data transmission; and an application plane which enables the reconfiguration of network functionalities. Nevertheless, this approach has exposed the controller as a prime target for malicious elements to attack it, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Current DDoS defense schemes often increased the controller load and resource consumption. These schemes are typically tailored for single-controller architectures, a significant limitation when considering the scalability requirements of large-scale SDN. To address these limitations, we introduce an efficient Federated Learning approach, named “FedLAD,” designed to counter DDoS attacks in SDN-based large-scale networks, particularly in multi-controller architectures. Federated learning is a decentralized approach to machine learning where models are trained across multiple devices as controllers store local data samples, without exchanging them. The evaluation of the proposed scheme's performance, using InSDN, CICDDoS2019, and CICDoS2017 datasets, shows an accuracy exceeding 98%, a significant improvement compared to related works. Furthermore, the evaluation of the FedLAD protocol with real-time traffic in an SDN context demonstrates its ability to detect DDoS attacks with high accuracy and minimal resource consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this work introduces a new technique in applying FL for DDoS attack detection in large-scale SDN.

A major concern in the recent past was the traditional static spectrum allocation which gave rise to spectrum underutilization and scarcity in wireless networks. In an attempt to solve this challenge, cognitive radios technology was proposed. It allows a spectrum to be accessed dynamically by Cognitive radio users or secondary users (SU). Dynamic access can efficiently be achieved by making necessary adjustment to some Medium access control (MAC) layer functionalities such as sensing and channel allocation. MAC protocols play a central role in scheduling sensing periods and channel allocation which ensure that the interference is reduced to a tolerable level. In order to improve the accuracy of sensing algorithm, necessary adjustments should be made at MAC layer. Sensing delays and errors are major challenges in the design of a more accurate spectrum sensing algorithm. This study focuses on designing a channel selection algorithm to efficiently utilize the spectrum. Channels are ordered and grouped to allow faster discovery of channel access opportunities. The ordering is based on descending order of channel’s idling probabilities. Grouping of channels ensured that channels are sensed simultaneously. These two techniques greatly reduce delays and maximized throughput of SU. Hence, Extended Generalized Predictive Channel Selection Algorithm, a proposed scheme has significantly performed better than its counterpart (Generalized Predictive Channel Selection Algorithm). Matlab simulation tool was used to simulate and plot the results of the proposed channel selection algorithm.

The exponential growth in wireless communication demands intelligent and adaptive spectrum-sharing solutions, especially within dynamic and densely populated 6G Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). This paper introduces a novel hybrid framework combing the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) with Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) for multi-objective optimisation in spectrum management. The proposed model balances spectrum efficiency, interference mitigation, energy conservation, collision rate reduction, and QoS maintenance. Evaluation on synthetic and ns-3 datasets shows that the NSGA-II and PPO hybrid consistently outperforms the random, greedy, and stand-alone PPO strategies, achieving higher cumulative reward, perfect fairness (Jain’s Fairness Index = 1.0), robust hypervolume convergence (65.1%), up to 12% reduction in PU collision rate, 20% lower interference, and approximately 40% improvement in energy efficiency. These findings validate the framework’s effectiveness in promoting fairness, reliability, and efficiency in 6G wireless communication systems.