Motivated by Industry 4.0, 5G-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; also known as drones) are widely applied in various industries. However, the open nature of 5G networks threatens the safe sharing of data. In particular, privacy leakage can lead to serious losses for users. As a new machine learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) avoids privacy leakage by allowing data models to be shared instead of raw data. Unfortunately, the traditional FL framework is strongly dependent on a centralized aggregation server, which will cause the system to crash if the server is compromised. Unauthorized participants may launch poisoning attacks, thereby reducing the usability of models. In addition, communication barriers hinder collaboration among a large number of cross-domain devices for learning. To address the abovementioned issues, a blockchain-empowered decentralized horizontal FL framework is proposed. The authentication of cross-domain UAVs is accomplished through multisignature smart contracts. Global model updates are computed by using these smart contracts instead of a centralized server. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves high efficiency of cross-domain authentication and good accuracy.

The evolution of the wireless network systems over decades has been providing new services to the users with the help of innovative network and device technologies. In recent times, the 5G network systems are about to be deployed which creates the opportunity to realize massive connectivity with high throughput, low latency, high energy efficiency and security. It also focuses on providing massive Internet of Things (IoT) network connectivity as well as services for good health, large-scale agricultural and industrial production, intelligent traffic control and electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems. However, the ever-increasing number of user devices is directing the researchers towards beyond 5G systems to allocate these user devices with higher bandwidth. Researches on the 6G wireless network systems have already begun to provide higher bandwidth availability for densely connected larger network devices with QoS surety. Researchers are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) for enhancing future IoT network operations and services. This paper attempts to discuss AI/ML algorithms that can help in developing energy efficient, secured and effective IoT network operations and services. In particular, our article concentrates on the major issues and factors that influence the design of the communication systems for future IoT with the integration of AI/ML. It also highlights application domains, including smart healthcare, smart agriculture, smart transportation, smart grid and smart industry that can operate efficiently and securely. Finally, this paper ends with the discussion on future research scopes with these algorithms in addressing the open issues of the future IoT network systems.

Agriculture 4.0, as the future of farming technology, includes several key enabling technologies towards sustainable agriculture. The use of state-of-the-art technologies, such as the Internet of Things, transform traditional cultivation practices, like irrigation, to modern solutions of precision agriculture. In this paper, we present in detail the subsystems and the architecture of an intelligent irrigation system for precision agriculture, the AREThOU5A IoT platform. We describe the operation of the IoT node that is utilized in the platform. Moreover, we apply the radiofrequency energy harvesting technique to the presented IoT platform, as an alternative technique to deliver power to the IoT node of the platform. To this end, we fabricate and validate a rectenna module for radiofrequency energy harvesting. Experimental results of the fabricated rectenna exhibit a satisfactory performance as a harvester of ambient sources in an outdoor environment.

The rise of the Internet of Medical Things introduces the healthcare ecosystem in a new digital era with multiple benefits, such as remote medical assistance, real-time monitoring, and pervasive control. However, despite the valuable healthcare services, this progression raises significant cybersecurity and privacy concerns. In this article, we focus our attention on the IEC 60 870-5-104 protocol, which is widely adopted in industrial healthcare systems. First, we investigate and assess the severity of the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks by providing a quantitative threat model, which relies on Attack Defence Trees and Common Vulnerability Scoring System v3.1. Next, we introduce an intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS), which is capable of discriminating and mitigating automatically the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks. The proposed IDPS takes full advantage of the machine learning (ML) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. ML is used to detect the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks, utilizing 1) Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol network flow statistics and 2) IEC 60 870-5-104 payload flow statistics. On the other side, the automated mitigation is transformed into a multiarmed bandit problem, which is solved through a reinforcement learning method called Thomson sampling and SDN. The evaluation analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed IDPS in terms of intrusion detection accuracy and automated mitigation performance. The detection accuracy and the F1 score of the proposed IDPS reach 0.831 and 0.8258, respectively, while the mitigation accuracy is calculated at 0.923.

We present unequally spaced linear array synthesis with sidelobe suppression under constraints to beamwidth and null control using a design technique based on a Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimizer (CLPSO). CLPSO utilizes a new learning strategy that achieves the goal to accelerate the convergence of the classical PSO. Numerical examples are compared to the existing array designs in the literature and to those found by the other evolutionary algorithms. The synthesis examples that are presented show that the CLPSO algorithm outperforms the common PSO algorithms and a real-coded genetic algorithm (GA).