Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, have gained a lot of popularity over the last decade. The use of autonomous drones appears to be a viable and low-cost solution to problems in many applications. Path planning capabilities are essential for autonomous control systems. An autonomous drone must be able to rapidly compute feasible and energy-efficient paths to avoid collisions. In this study, we review two key aspects of path planning: environmental representation and path generation techniques. Common path planning techniques are analyzed, and their key limitations are highlighted. Finally, we review thirty-five highly cited publications to identify current trends in drone path planning research. We then use these results to identify factors that need to be addressed in future studies in order to develop a practical path planner for autonomous drones.

Proper security solutions in the cyber world are crucial for enforcing network security by providing real-time network protection against network vulnerabilities and data exploitation. An effective intrusion detection strategy is capable of taking a holistic approach for protecting critical systems against unauthorized access or attack. In this paper, we describe a machine learning (ML) based comprehensive security solution for network intrusion detection using ensemble supervised ML framework and ensemble feature selection methods. In addition, we provide a comparative analysis of several ML models and feature selection methods. The goal of this research is to design a generic detection mechanism and achieve higher accuracy with minimal false positive rates (FPR). NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and CICIDS2017 datasets are used in the experiment, and results show that our detection model can identify 99.3% of intrusions successfully with the lowest 0.5% of false alarms, which depicts better performance metrics compared to existing solutions.

Our increasingly connected world continues to face an ever-growing number of network-based attacks. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is an essential security technology used for detecting these attacks. Although numerous Machine Learning-based IDSs have been proposed for the detection of malicious network traffic, the majority have difficulty properly detecting and classifying the more uncommon attack types. In this paper, we implement a novel hybrid technique using synthetic data produced by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to use as input for training a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model. Our GAN model is trained on the NSL-KDD dataset, a publicly available collection of labeled network traffic data specifically designed to support the evaluation and benchmarking of IDSs. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that training the DRL model on synthetic datasets generated by specific GAN models can result in better performance in correctly classifying minority classes over training on the true imbalanced dataset.

Rapid and widespread adoption of emerging Information Technology (IT) infrastructures and services in commercial and private endeavors opens new horizons for novel cyberattacks. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) gained attention as an effective means of combating various cyber threats. Recent research demonstrates the potency of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches in the development of NIDS. In this paper, we propose a DL-based framework called the Ensemble Framework for Network Intrusion Detection System (ENIDS) to detect various types of cyberattacks, which includes dynamic data pre-processing, optimal feature selection, the handling of imbalanced data samples, and a DL-based ensemble model. Our DL-based ensemble model is comprised of two layers: the base learner and the meta-learner. The base learner is composed of three robust DL models: convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent units (GRU), and the meta-learner is a deep neural network (DNN) model. The proposed framework experimented with two publicly available and popular network traffic datasets, namely UNSW-15 and CICIDS-2017. In the UNSW-15 and CICIDS-2017 datasets, our proposed framework detects cyberattacks with an accuracy of 90.6% and 99.6% and an F1-score of 90.5 and 99.6%, respectively. According to experimental findings, the proposed ensemble framework outperforms existing state-ofthe-art approaches and demonstrates better performance than benchmark DL methods in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and execution time for training and testing.

Designing survivable communication networks to achieve carrier-grade five-nines reliability is of paramount importance for the network operators. This article addresses service reliability and its related aspects such as nodal reachability, network connectivity, and edge-disjoint routing in both traditional networks and software defined networks (SDNs). The proposed roadmap is based on two phases: Fundamental analytical phase and performance evaluation phase. In the first phase, a graph operator is defined to analyze the characteristics of the reliability metric and its associated reachability feature. This phase will focus on both the macro- and micro-level properties of reliability. In the second phase, we exploit the analysis in the former phase to get an insight into the performance evaluation of traditional and SDN-based networks against the reliability metric, and then calculate the statistical significance of the mean difference of their reliability values. Reliability under edge-disjoint paths to avoid resource competition is also investigated. Various types of topologies are utilized to test the service reliability of both architecture designs. Extensive simulation results show that SDN-based networks have comparable performance to its legacy counterpart against the operational reliability metric. Our findings not only shed light on enhancing reliability using edge-disjoint paths under link failure scenarios but also expected to benefit the operators to achieve their service level objectives while migrating from legacy to SDN-based platform.

The task of predicting internet traffic is challenging, particularly in multi-step forecasting due to the volatile and random nature of data. In addition, real-world traffic may contain outlier data points, so developing a prediction model that integrates anomaly detection and mitigation is necessary. This paper compares several deep sequence models, such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), LSTM Encoder-Decoder (LSTM En De), LSTM Encoder-Decoder with attention layer (LSTM En De Atn), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), with our proposed methodology for single-step prediction. Our proposed LSTM En De model, integrated with outlier detection, outperforms traditional deep sequence models in single-step prediction, reducing the deviation between actual and predicted traffic by over 11%. We also apply our methodology to multi-step forecast analysis, using multiple output strategies for forecast horizons of 3, 6, 9, and 12 steps ahead. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology in improving the accuracy of singlestep prediction and multi-step forecasting tasks, especially when dealing with outlier data points that adversely affect model accuracy. In summary, this paper investigates the challenges of real-world internet traffic prediction, proposes a novel prediction model integrated with anomaly detection and mitigation, and compares different deep sequence models for single-step and multi-step forecasting tasks.