The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler technology that recently received significant attention from the scientific community across the globe. It helps transform everyone’s life by connecting physical and virtual devices with each other to offer staggering benefits, such as automation and control, higher productivity, real-time information access, and improved efficiency. However, IoT devices and their accumulated data are susceptible to various security threats and vulnerabilities, such as data integrity, denial-of-service, interception, and information disclosure attacks. In recent years, the IoT with blockchain technology has seen rapid growth, where smart contracts play an essential role in validating IoT data. However, these smart contracts can be vulnerable and degrade the performance of IoT applications. Hence, besides offering indispensable features to ease human lives, there is also a need to confront IoT environment security attacks, especially data integrity attacks. Toward this aim, this paper proposed an artificial intelligence-based system model with a dual objective. It first detects the malicious user trying to compromise the IoT environment using a binary classification problem. Further, blockchain technology is utilized to offer tamper-proof storage to store non-malicious IoT data. However, a malicious user can exploit the blockchain-based smart contract to deteriorate the performance IoT environment. For that, this paper utilizes deep learning algorithms to classify malicious and non-malicious smart contracts. The proposed system model offers an end-to-end security pipeline through which the IoT data are disseminated to the recipient. Lastly, the proposed system model is evaluated by considering different assessment measures that comprise the training accuracy, training loss, classification measures (precision, recall, and F1 score), and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.

This paper presents a numerical model regarding the passive cooling of PV panels through perforated and non-perforated heat sinks. A typical PV panel was studied in a fixed position, tilted at 45 degrees from the horizontal with the wind direction towards its backside. A challenging approach was used in order to calibrate the base case of the numerical model according to the NOCT conditions. Further validation of the accuracy of the numerical simulation consisted of a comparison between the results obtained for the base case, or heat sink, with horizontal non-perforated fins and the experiments presented in the literature. Six types of heat sink attached to the backside of the PV panel were numerically studied. The analyzed configurations focused on heat sinks with both perforated and non-perforated fins that were distributed horizontally and vertically. The CFD simulation was also conducted by modeling the air volume around the PV panel in real wind conditions. The main output parameters were the average temperature and the convective heat transfer coefficient on the front and back of the PV panel. The most important effect of cooling was achieved in low wind conditions and high levels of solar radiation. For v_air = 1 m/s, G = 1000 W/m² and ambient temperature t_air = 35 °C, the percentage of maximum power production achieved 83.33% for the base case, while in the best cooling scenario it reached 88.74%, assuring a rise in the power production of 6.49%.

Mobile applications have rapidly grown over the past few decades to offer futuristic applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart farming, and smart city. Such applications require ubiquitous, real-time, and secure communications to deliver services quickly. Toward this aim, sixth-generation (6G) wireless technology offers superior performance with high reliability, enhanced transmission rate, and low latency. However, managing the resources of the aforementioned applications is highly complex in the precarious network. An adversary can perform various network-related attacks (i.e., data injection or modification) to jeopardize the regular operation of the smart applications. Therefore, incorporating blockchain technology in the smart application can be a prominent solution to tackle security, reliability, and data-sharing privacy concerns. Motivated by the same, we presented a case study on public safety applications that utilizes the essential characteristics of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and a 6G network to handle data integrity attacks on the crime data. The case study is assessed using various performance parameters by considering blockchain scalability, packet drop ratio, and training accuracy. Lastly, we explored different research challenges of adopting blockchain in the 6G wireless network.

With the rapid growth in the data and processing over the cloud, it has become easier to access those data. On the other hand, it poses many technical and security challenges to the users of those provisions. Fog computing makes these technical issues manageable to some extent. Fog computing is one of the promising solutions for handling the big data produced by the IoT, which are often security-critical and time-sensitive. Massive IoT data analytics by a fog computing structure is emerging and requires extensive research for more proficient knowledge and smart decisions. Though an advancement in big data analytics is taking place, it does not consider fog data analytics. However, there are many challenges, including heterogeneity, security, accessibility, resource sharing, network communication overhead, the real-time data processing of complex data, etc. This paper explores various research challenges and their solution using the next-generation fog data analytics and IoT networks. We also performed an experimental analysis based on fog computing and cloud architecture. The result shows that fog computing outperforms the cloud in terms of network utilization and latency. Finally, the paper is concluded with future trends.

Over the last few decades, the healthcare industry has continuously grown, with hundreds of thousands of patients obtaining treatment remotely using smart devices. Data security becomes a prime concern with such a massive increase in the number of patients. Numerous attacks on healthcare data have recently been identified that can put the patient’s identity at stake. For example, the private data of millions of patients have been published online, posing a severe risk to patients’ data privacy. However, with the advent of Industry 4.0, medical practitioners can digitally assess the patient’s condition and administer prompt prescriptions. However, wearable devices are also vulnerable to numerous security threats, such as session hijacking, data manipulation, and spoofing attacks. Attackers can tamper with the patient’s wearable device and relays the tampered data to the concerned doctor. This can put the patient’s life at high risk. Since blockchain is a transparent and immutable decentralized system, it can be utilized for securely storing patient’s wearable data. Artificial Intelligence (AI), on the other hand, utilizes different machine learning techniques to classify malicious data from an oncoming stream of patient’s wearable data. An amalgamation of these two technologies would make the possibility of tampering the patient’s data extremely difficult. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a blockchain and AI-envisioned secure and trusted framework (HEART). Here, Long-Short Term Model (LSTM) is used to classify wearable devices as malicious or non-malicious. Then, we design a smart contract that allows only of those patients’ data having a wearable device to be classified as non-malicious to the public blockchain network. This information is then accessible to all involved in the patient’s care. We then evaluate the HEART’s performance considering various evaluation metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision, scalability, and network latency. On the training and testing sets, the model achieves accuracies of 93% and 92.92%, respectively.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a significant cause of death worldwide. CVDs can be prevented by diagnosing heartbeat sounds and other conventional techniques early to reduce the harmful effects caused by CVDs. However, it is still challenging to segment, extract features, and predict heartbeat sounds in elderly people. The inception of deep learning (DL) algorithms has helped detect various types of heartbeat sounds at an early stage. Motivated by this, we proposed an intelligent architecture categorizing heartbeat into normal and murmurs for elderly people. We have used a standard heartbeat dataset with heartbeat class labels, i.e., normal and murmur. Furthermore, it is augmented and preprocessed by normalization and standardization to significantly reduce computational power and time. The proposed convolutional neural network and bi-directional gated recurrent unit (CNN + BiGRU) attention-based architecture for the classification of heartbeat sound achieves an accuracy of 90% compared to the baseline approaches. Hence, the proposed novel CNN + BiGRU attention-based architecture is superior to other DL models for heartbeat sound classification.