Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is the transportation version of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in road scenarios. One key technology of VEC is task offloading, which allows vehicles to send their computation tasks to the surrounding Roadside Units (RSUs) or other vehicles for execution, thereby reducing computation delay and energy consumption. However, the existing task offloading schemes still have various gaps and face challenges that should be addressed because vehicles with time-varying trajectories need to process massive data with high complexity and diversity. In this paper, a VEC-based computation offloading model is developed with consideration of data dependency of tasks. The minimization of the average response time and average energy consumption of the system is defined as a combinatorial optimization problem. To solve this problem, we propose a M obility-aware d e pendent ta s k o ffloadi n g (MESON) Scheme for urban VEC and develop a DRL-based algorithm to train the offloading strategy. To improve the training efficiency, a vehicle mobility detection algorithm is further designed to detect the communication time between vehicles and RSUs. In this way, MESON can avoid unreasonable decisions by lowering the size of the action space. Moreover, to improve the system stability and the offloading successful rate, we design a task priority determination scheme to prioritize the tasks in the waiting queue. The experimental results show that MESON is superior compared to other task offloading schemes in terms of the average response time, average system energy consumption, and offloading successful rate.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a key element in e-health to monitor bodies. This technology enables new applications under the umbrella of different domains, including the medical field, the entertainment and ambient intelligence areas. This survey paper places substantial emphasis on the concept and key features of the WBAN technology. First, the WBAN concept is introduced and a review of key applications facilitated by this networking technology is provided. The study then explores a wide variety of communication standards and methods deployed in this technology. Due to the sensitivity and criticality of the data carried and handled by WBAN, fault tolerance is a critical issue and widely discussed in this paper. Hence, this survey investigates thoroughly the reliability and fault tolerance paradigms suggested for WBANs. Open research and challenging issues pertaining to fault tolerance, coexistence and interference management and power consumption are also discussed along with some suggested trends in these aspects.

This century has been a major avenue for revolutionary changes in technology and industry. Industries have transitioned towards intelligent automation, relying less on human intervention, resulting in the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. That is why IoT has been the researcher’s arena for quite some time. With Industry 4.0 still in motion, the world is on the verge of the 5th industrial revolution, a relatively new concept with many unclear opinions regarding its potential benefits, challenges, opportunities, trends, and impact on society. There is a dire need for a broader and more critical perspective. This research paints a bigger picture of “What is happening?” and “What to expect?” during the transition phase of Industry 5.0. In this comprehensive review, we have addressed the state-of-the-art practices in Industry 4.0 and the transitional phase of Industry 5.0. We have highlighted the most promising key enabling technologies, trends, research topics, rising challenges, and unfolding opportunities that can help prepare society for this paradigm shift. The paper then surveys the work toward the outstanding key enablers, challenges, trends, and opportunities for the IoT evolution for Industry 5.0. To spur further avenues for researchers and industrialists, the paper offers conclusive insights at the end. In addition, the article has a precise set of research questions answered in consequent sections and subsections for the reader’s clarity.

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising paradigm that exposes Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to road scenarios. In VEC, task offloading can enable vehicles to offload the computing tasks to nearby Roadside Units (RSUs) that deploy computing capabilities. However, the highly dynamic network topology, strict low-delay constraints, and massive data of tasks of VEC pose significant challenges for implementing efficient offloading. Digital Twin-based VEC is emerging as a promising solution that enables real-time monitoring of the state of the VEC network through mapping and interaction between the physical and virtual worlds, thus assisting in making sound offload decisions in the physical world. Thus, this paper proposes an intelligent partial offloading scheme, namely, Digital Twin-Assisted Intelligent Partial Offloading (IGNITE). First, to find the optimal offloading space in advance, we combine the improved clustering algorithm with the Digital Twin (DT) technique, in which unreasonable decisions can be avoided by reducing the size of the decision space. Second, to reduce the overall cost of the system, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm is employed to train the offloading strategy, allowing for automatic optimization of computational delay and vehicle service price. To improve the efficiency of cooperation between digital and physical spaces, a feedback mechanism is established. It can adjust the parameters of the clustering algorithm based on the final offloading results in this clustering. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on DT-assisted vehicle offloading that proposes a feedback mechanism, forming a complete closed loop as prediction-offloading-feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IGNITE has significant advantages in terms of total system computational cost, total computational delay, and offloading success rate compared with its counterparts.

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is a disruptive technology that allows wireless energy provisioning for energy-limited IoT devices, thus decreasing the over-reliance on batteries and wires. WPT could replace conventional energy provisioning (e.g., energy harvesting) and expand to be deployed in many of our daily-life applications, including but not limited to healthcare, transportation, automation, and smart cities. As a new rising technology, WPT has attracted many researchers from academia and industry about WPT technologies and wireless charging scheduling algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we review the most recent studies related to WPT, including classifications, advantages, disadvantages, and main domains of application. Furthermore, we review the recently designed wireless charging scheduling algorithms (schemes) for wireless sensor networks. Our study provides a detailed survey of wireless charging scheduling schemes covering the main scheme classifications, evaluation metrics, application domains, advantages, and disadvantages of each charging scheme. We further summarize trends and opportunities for applying WPT at some intersections.

Privacy is a serious concern related to sharing videos or images among people over the Internet. As a method to preserve images’ privacy, chaos-based image encryption algorithms have been used widely to fulfil such a requirement. However, these algorithms suffer from a low key-space, significant computational overhead, and a lag in resistance against differential attacks. This paper presents a novel chaos-based image encryption method based on permutation and substitution using a single Substitution Box (S-Box) to address issues in contemporary image encryption algorithms. The proposed encryption technique’s efficiency is validated through extensive experiments as compared to the state-of-the-art encryption algorithms using different measures and benchmarks. Precisely, the collected results demonstrate that the proposed technique is more resilient against well-known statistical attacks and performs well under plaintext attacks. Indeed, the proposed scheme exhibits very high sensitivity concerning the plaintext attack. A minor change in the encryption key or the plain text would result in a completely different encrypted image.