In recent years, constant developments in Internet of Things (IoT) generate large amounts of data, which put pressure on Cloud computing’s infrastructure. The proposed Fog computing architecture is considered the next generation of Cloud Computing for meeting the requirements posed by the device network of IoT. One of the obstacles of Fog Computing is distribution of computing resources to minimize completion time and operating cost. The following study introduces a new approach to optimize task scheduling problem for Bag-of-Tasks applications in Cloud–Fog environment in terms of execution time and operating costs. The proposed algorithm named TCaS was tested on 11 datasets varying in size. The experimental results show an improvement of 15.11% compared to the Bee Life Algorithm (BLA) and 11.04% compared to Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO), while achieving balance between completing time and operating cost.

Anti-forgery information, transaction verification, and smart contract are functionalities of blockchain technology that can change the traditional business processes of IT applications. These functionalities increase the data transparency, and trust of users in the new application models, thus resolving many different social problems today. In this work, we take all the advantages of this technology to build a blockchain-based authentication system (called the Vietnamese Educational Certification blockchain, which stands for VECefblock) to deal with the delimitation of fake certificate issues in Vietnam. In this direction, firstly, we categorize and analyze blockchain research and application trends to make out our contributions in this domain. Our motivating factor is to curb fake certificates in Vietnam by applying the suitability of blockchain technology to the problem domain. This study proposed some blockchain-based application development principles in order to build a step by step VECefblock with the following procedures: designing overall architecture along with business processes, data mapping structure and implementing the decentralized application that can meet the specific Vietnamese requirements. To test system functionalities, we used Hyperledger Fabric as a blockchain platform that is deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Through performance evaluations, we proved the operability of VECefblock in the practical deployment environment. This experiment also shows the feasibility of our proposal, thus promoting the application of blockchain technology to deal with social problems in general as well as certificate management in Vietnam.

With the appearance of more and more devices connected to the Internet, the world has witnessed an ever-growing number of data to be processed. Among those, many tasks require swift execution time, while the storage and computation capability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are limited. To address the demands of delay-sensitive tasks, we present a vehicular edge–cloud computing (VECC) network that leverages powerful computation capabilities through the deployment of servers in proximity to task-generated devices, as well as the utilization of idle resources from smart vehicles to share the workload. Because these limited resources are vulnerable to sudden data arising, it is imperative to incorporate cloud servers to prevent system overload. The challenge now is to find a task offloading strategy that collaborates both edges and cloud resources to minimize the total time surpassing the quality baseline of each task (tolerance time) and make all tasks meet their soft deadlines of quality. To reach this goal, we first model the task offloading problem in VECC as a Markov decision process (MDP). Then, we propose advantage-oriented task offloading with a dueling actor-insulator network scheme to solve the problem. This value-based reinforcement learning (RL) method helps the agent find an effective policy when not knowing all the state attributes changes. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by performance evaluations based on real-world bus traces in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The experimental results show that our proposal reduces the tolerance time by at least 8.81% compared to other RL algorithms and 75% compared to greedy approaches.

In this paper, a novel algorithm called opposition-based coral reefs optimization (OCRO) is introduced. The algorithm is built as an improvement for coral reefs optimization (CRO) using opposition-based learning (OBL). For efficient modeling as the main part of this work, a novel time series forecasting model called OCRO-multi-layer neural network (MLNN) is proposed to explore hidden relationships in the non-linear time series data. The model thus combines OCRO with MLNN for data processing, which enables reducing the model complexity by faster convergence than the traditional back-propagation algorithm. For validation of the proposed model, three real-world datasets are used, including Internet traffic collected from a private internet service provider (ISP) with distributed centers in 11 European cities, WorldCup 98 contains request numbers to the server in football world cup season in 1998, and Google cluster log dataset gathered from its data center. Through the carried out experiments, we demonstrated that with both univariate and multivariate data, the proposed prediction model gains good performance in accuracy, run time and model stability aspects as compared with other modern learning techniques like recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). In addition, with used real datasets, we intend to concentrate on applying OCRO-MLNN to distributed systems in order to enable the proactive resource allocation capability for e-infrastructures (e.g. clouds services, Internet of Things systems, or blockchain networks).