Cloud Computing (CC) is a promising technology due to its pervasive features, such as online storage, high scalability, and seamless accessibility, in that it plays an important role in reduction of the capital cost and workforce, which attracts organizations to conduct their businesses and financial activities over the cloud. Even though CC is a great innovation in the aspect of computing with ease of access, it also has some drawbacks. With the increase of cloud usage, security issues are proportional to the increase. To address these, there has been much work done in this domain, whereas research work considering the growing constrained applications provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city networks are still lacking. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive security analysis of CC-enabled IoT and present state-of-the-art in the research area. Finally, future research work and possible areas of implementation and consideration are given to discuss open issues.

Traction applications, such as electric and hybrid vehicles, require the electrical motor to be operated at low load conditions during most of their driving cycle. Permanent magnet (PM) motors in this case may not be an optimal choice due to their poor efficiency under low load conditions despite the fact that they exhibit the best output characteristics at the rated load. However, the wound rotor synchronous motor (WRSM) demonstrates the best efficiency at low load conditions due to their controllable excitation. This paper presents an interesting comparison of WRSM and the PM motor in terms of their efficiency over the entire drive cycle of traction applications, which demonstrates that WRSMs are more suitable compared to the apparently best performance PM motor. A WRSM with similar dimensions to the 2010 Toyota Prius interior permanent synchronous motor (IPMSM) was designed and optimized in this regard. The performance comparison of the PM motor and the WRSM was presented using 2-D finite element analysis (FEA) for the WRSM and the performance analysis report of the Toyota Prius IPMSM published by the US department of energies. The FEA analysis shows that the WRSM can achieve wide torque speed characteristics. Moreover, the WRSM exhibits better efficiency under low load conditions at the higher speed or field weakening region.

Energy-efficient management and highly reliable communication and transmission mechanisms are major issues in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) due to the limited battery power of UWSN nodes within an harsh underwater environment. In this paper, we integrate the three main techniques that have been used for managing Transmission Power-based Sparsity-conscious Energy-Efficient Clustering (CTP-SEEC) in UWSNs. These incorporate the adaptive power control mechanism that converts to a suitable Transmission Power Level (TPL), and deploys collaboration mobile sinks or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to gather information locally to achieve energy and data management efficiency (Security) in the WSN. The proposed protocol is rigorously evaluated through extensive simulations and is validated by comparing it with state-of-the-art UWSN protocols. The simulation results are based on the static environmental condition, which shows that the proposed protocol performs well in terms of network lifetime, packet delivery, and throughput.

Reverse image search has been a vital and emerging research area of information retrieval. One of the primary research foci of information retrieval is to increase the space and computational efficiency by converting a large image database into an efficiently computed feature database. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based methodology, which captures channel-wise, low-level details of each image. In the first phase, sparse auto-encoder (SAE), a deep generative model, is applied to RGB channels of each image for unsupervised representational learning. In the second phase, transfer learning is utilized by using VGG-16, a variant of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The output of SAE combined with the original RGB channel is forwarded to VGG-16, thereby producing a more effective feature database by the ensemble/collaboration of two effective models. The proposed method provides an information rich feature space that is a reduced dimensionality representation of the image database. Experiments are performed on a hybrid dataset that is developed by combining three standard publicly available datasets. The proposed approach has a retrieval accuracy (precision) of 98.46%, without using the metadata of images, by using a cosine similarity measure between the query image and the image database. Additionally, to further validate the proposed methodology’s effectiveness, image quality has been degraded by adding 5% noise (Speckle, Gaussian, and Salt pepper noise types) in the hybrid dataset. Retrieval accuracy has generally been found to be 97% for different variants of noise

Machine learning has the potential to predict unseen data and thus improve the productivity and processes of daily life activities. Notwithstanding its adaptiveness, several sensitive applications based on such technology cannot compromise our trust in them; thus, highly accurate machine learning models require reason. Such models are black boxes for end-users. Therefore, the concept of interpretability plays the role if assisting users in a couple of ways. Interpretable models are models that possess the quality of explaining predictions. Different strategies have been proposed for the aforementioned concept but some of these require an excessive amount of effort, lack generalization, are not agnostic and are computationally expensive. Thus, in this work, we propose a strategy that can tackle the aforementioned issues. A surrogate model assisted us in building interpretable models. Moreover, it helped us achieve results with accuracy close to that of the black box model but with less processing time. Thus, the proposed technique is computationally cheaper than traditional methods. The significance of such a novel technique is that data science developers will not have to perform strenuous hands-on activities to undertake feature engineering tasks and end-users will have the graphical-based explanation of complex models in a comprehensive way—consequently building trust in a machine.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been applied in networking devices, and a new problem has emerged called source-location privacy (SLP) in critical security systems. In wireless sensor networks, hiding the location of the source node from the hackers is known as SLP. The WSNs have limited battery capacity and low computational ability. Many state-of-the-art protocols have been proposed to address the SLP problems and other problems such as limited battery capacity and low computational power. One of the popular protocols is random path routing (RPR), and in random path routing, the system keeps sending the message randomly along all the possible paths from a source node to a sink node irrespective of the path’s distance. The problem arises when the system keeps sending a message via the longest route, resulting because of high battery usage and computational costs. This research paper presents a novel networking model referred to as calculated random path routing (CRPR). CRPR first calculates the top three shortest paths, and then randomly sends a token to any of the top three shortest calculated paths, ensuring the optimal tradeoff between computational cost and SLP. The proposed methodology includes the formal modeling of the CRPR in Colored Petri Nets. We have validated and verified the CRPR, and the results depict the optimal tradeoff.