The rapid growth of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has brought huge challenges for large data storage, intelligent management, and information security for the entire system. The traditional centralized management approach for IoV faces the difficulty in dealing with real time response. The blockchain, as an effective technology for decentralized distributed storage and security management, has already showed great advantages in its application of Bitcoin. In this paper, we investigate how the blockchain technology could be extended to the application of vehicle networking, especially with the consideration of the distributed and secure storage of big data. We define several types of nodes such as vehicle and roadside for vehicle networks and form several sub-blockchain networks. In the paper, we present a model of the outward transmission of vehicle blockchain data, and then give detail theoretical analysis and numerical results. Our study has shown the potential to guide the application of Blockchain for future vehicle networking.

Visible light communication, considered as a potential access option for 5G wireless communications, is gaining extensive attention. VLC has strengths in energy efficiency and ultra wide bandwidth, but also has weakness in transmission range and obstacles in transmission paths. This article aims to provide a conclusive investigation of the latest progress in research on VLC, which can be used as part of 5G wireless communication systems. This work highlights the strengths and weaknesses of VLC in comparison with RF-based communications, especially in spectrum, spatial reuse, security and energy efficiency. The article also investigates various lighting sources proposed for VLC systems. It summarizes the literature work on VLC networking into two categories: fixed and mobile VLC communications.

Internet of Things has been one of the catalysts in revolutionizing conventional healthcare services. With the growing society, traditional healthcare systems reach their capacity in providing sufficient and high-quality services. The world is facing the aging population and the inherent need for assisted-living environments for senior citizens. There is also a commitment by national healthcare organizations to increase support for personalized, integrated care to prevent and manage chronic conditions. Many applications related to In-Home Health Monitoring have been introduced over the last few decades, thanks to the advances in mobile and Internet of Things technologies and services. Such advances include improvements in optimized network architecture, indoor networks coverage, increased device reliability and performance, ultra-low device cost, low device power consumption, and improved device and network security and privacy. Current studies of in-home health monitoring systems presented many benefits including improved safety, quality of life and reduction in hospitalization and cost. However, many challenges of such a paradigm shift still exist, that need to be addressed to support scale-up and wide uptake of such systems, including technology acceptance and adoption by patients, healthcare providers and policymakers. The aim of this paper is three folds: First, review of key factors that drove the adoption and growth of the IoT-based in-home remote monitoring; Second, present the latest advances of IoT based in-home remote monitoring system architecture and key building blocks; Third, discuss future outlook and our recommendations of the in-home remote monitoring applications going forward.

Wireless body area networks (BANs) have drawn much attention from research community and industry in recent years. Multimedia healthcare services provided by BANs can be available to anyone, anywhere, and anytime seamlessly. A critical issue in BANs is how to preserve the integrity and privacy of a person's medical data over wireless environments in a resource efficient manner. This paper presents a novel key agreement scheme that allows neighboring nodes in BANs to share a common key generated by electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The improved Jules Sudan (IJS) algorithm is proposed to set up the key agreement for the message authentication. The proposed ECG-IJS key agreement can secure data commnications over BANs in a plug-n-play manner without any key distribution overheads. Both the simulation and experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve better security performance in terms of serval performance metrics such as false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) than other existing approaches. In addition, the power consumption analysis also shows that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve energy efficiency for BANs.

To offload and alleviate the heavy base station (BS) traffic load caused by the rapidly growing video services, Deviceto- Device (D2D) communication, as one of the most indispensable technologies of the future cellular networks, can be potentially exploited by mobile users to distribute videos for a BS. In this paper, an effective pricing-based multicast video distribution system and a grid-based clustering method are proposed to support the distribution. Moreover, with the consideration of users’ mobility and social characteristics, we classify them into multicast and core types by studying the user stay probability and familiarity. In particular, core users can cooperate with the BS to distribute videos to the multicast users through intracluster D2D multicast. However, core users can not selflessly help the BS to distribute videos, instead, they will evaluate their personal benefits before distributing the videos to the multicast users. Further, a stackelberg game-based pricing mechanism is proposed to inspire the core users to distribute videos. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can not only effectively alleviate the BS traffic load, but also significantly improve the effectiveness and reliability of video transmission.

With the fast growing of multimedia communication applications, cognitive radio networks have gained the popularity as they can provide high wireless bandwidth and support quality-driven wireless multimedia services. In multimedia applications such as video conferences over the cognitive radio, the Quality of Experience (QoE) that directly measures the satisfaction of the end users cannot be easily realized due to the limited spectrum resources. The opportunistic spectrum access cognitive radio (CR) is an efficient technology to address this issue. However, the unstable channels allocated to the multimedia secondary users (SUs) can be re-occupied by the primary users (PUs) at any time, which makes the CR difficult to meet the QoE requirements. Therefore, it is important to study how to allocate frequency or spectrum resources to SUs according to their QoE requirements. This paper proposes a novel QoE-driven channel allocation scheme for SUs and cognitive radio networks (CRN) base station (BS). The historical QoE data under different primary channels (PCs) are collected by the SUs and delivered to a Cognitive Radio Base Station (CRBS). The CRBS will allocate available channel resources to the SUs based on their QoE expectations and maintain a priority service queue. The modified ON/OFF models of PCs and service queue models of SUs are jointly investigated for this channel allocation scheme. The performance of multimedia transmission of images and H.264 videos under our CR channel allocation scheme is studied, the results show that the proposed channel allocation approach can significantly improve the QoE of the priority-based SUs over the cognitive radio networks.