Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a spatially distributed set of autonomous connected sensor nodes. The deployed sensor nodes are extensively used for sensing and monitoring for environmental surveillance, military operations, transportation monitoring, and healthcare monitoring. The sensor nodes in these networks have limited resources in terms of battery, storage, and processing. In some scenarios, the sensor nodes are deployed closer to the base station and responsible to forward their own and neighbor nodes’ data towards the base station and depleted energy. This issue is called a hotspot in the network. Hotspot issues mainly appear in those locations where traffic load is more on the sensor nodes. The dynamic and unequal clustering techniques have been used and mitigate the hotspot issues. However, with few benefits, these solutions have suffered from coverage overhead, network connection issues, unbalanced energy utilization among the sink nodes, and network stability issues. In this paper, a comprehensive review of various equal clustering, unequal clustering, and hybrid clustering approaches with their clustering attributes is presented to mitigate hotspot issues in heterogeneous WSNs by using various parameters such as cluster head selection, number of clusters, zone formation, transmission, and routing parameters. This review provides a detailed platform for new researchers to explore the new and novel solutions to solve the hotspot issues in these networks.

The Internet of Things is emerging as a crucial technology in aiding humans and making their lives easier. Among the human population, a large percentage of people suffer from disabilities resulting in challenges in everyday life particularly people with visual disabilities. While several inventions exist to aid people with blindness in their everyday lives, the tools are not adequate in terms of accessibility and efficiency. Smart cane is a useful technology that is being researched and developed to enhance navigation of the visually impaired through smart obstacle detection. Moreover, artificial intelligence is being incorporated in these devices to provide users with a sense of vision and allow them greater independence. However, these devices are expensive and often do not contain the desired functionality in a compact single device. The research by I‐CANe aims to create a low‐cost, single device system that is equipped with obstacle detection and identification features to enhance navigation for users without using multiple detection devices. The cane will also incorporate wireless communications for safety features such as Global Positioning System tracking and Global System for Mobile communication to allow maximum independence of the user.

Use of cloud resources has increased with the increasing trend of organizations and governments towards cloud adaptation. This increase in cloud resource usage, leads to enormous amounts of energy consumption by cloud data center servers. Energy can be conserved in a cloud server by demand-based scaling of resources. But reactive scaling may lead to excessive scaling. That, in turn, results in enormous energy consumption by useless scale up and scale down. The scaling granularity can also result in excessive scaling of the resource. Without a proper mechanism for estimating cloud resource usage may lead to significant scaling overheads. To overcome, such inefficiencies, we present Cartesian genetic programming based neural network for resource estimation and a rule-based scaling system for IaaS cloud server. Our system consists of a resource monitor, a resource estimator and a scaling mechanism. The resource monitor takes resource utilizations and feeds to the estimator for efficient estimation of resources. The scaling system uses the resource estimator’s output for scaling the resource with the granularity of a CPU core. The proposed method has been trained and tested with real traces of Bitbrains data center, producing promising results in real-time. It has shown better prediction accuracy and energy efficiency than predictive scaling systems from literature.

Cloud computing use is exponentially increasing with the advent of industrial revolution 4.0 technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and digital transformations. These technologies require cloud data centers to process massive volumes of workloads. As a result, the data centers consume gigantic amounts of electrical energy, and a large portion of data center electrical energy comes from fossil fuels. It causes greenhouse gas emissions and thus ensuing in global warming. An adaptive resource utilization mechanism of cloud data center resources is vital to get by with this huge problem. The adaptive system will estimate the resource utilization and then adjust the resources accordingly. Cloud resource utilization estimation is a two-fold challenging task. First, the cloud workloads are sundry, and second, clients’ requests are uneven. In the literature, several machine learning models have estimated cloud resources, of which artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown better performance. Conventional ANNs have a fixed topology and allow only to train their weights either by back-propagation or neuroevolution such as a genetic algorithm. In this paper, we propose Cartesian genetic programming (CGP) neural network (CGPNN). The CGPNN enhances the performance of conventional ANN by allowing training of both its parameters and topology, and it uses a built-in sliding window. We have trained CGPNN with parallel neuroevolution that searches for global optimum through numerous directions. The resource utilization traces of the Bitbrains data center is used for validation of the proposed CGPNN and compared results with machine learning models from the literature on the same data set. The proposed method has outstripped the machine learning models from the literature and resulted in 97% prediction accuracy.

This paper presents an optimization method for solving the Power Economic Dispatch (PED) problem of thermal generation units with multiple fuels and valve point loadings. The proposed optimizer is a variant of Differential Evolution (DE) characterized as a Stud Differential Evolution (SDE), which has been proposed earlier and implemented on a hydrothermal energy system. In SDE, an operator named Stud Crossover (SC) is introduced in the conventional DE during the trial vector updating process. In SC operator, a best vector gives its optimal information to all other population members through mating. The proposed algorithm’s effectiveness to solve Multiple Fuel PED problem, with and without Valve Point Loading Effects (VPLEs), has been validated by testing it on 10 machine multiple fuel standard test systems having 2400 MW, 2500 MW, 2600 MW, and 2700 MW load demands. The results depict the strength of SDE over various other methods in the literature.