The advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to technological advancements in a plethora of domains. Healthcare, education, and smart city services are now enriched with AI capabilities. These technological advancements would not have been realized without the assistance of fast, secure, and fault-tolerant communication media. Traditional processing, communication, and storage technologies cannot maintain high levels of scalability and user experience for immersive services. The metaverse is an immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual world that integrates fantasy and reality into a virtual environment using advanced virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices. Such an environment is still being developed and requires extensive research in order for it to be realized to its highest attainable levels. In this article, we discuss some of the key issues required in order to attain realization of metaverse services. We propose a framework that integrates digital twin (DT) with other advanced technologies, such as the sixth-generation (6G) communication network, blockchain, and AI, to maintain continuous end-to-end metaverse services. This article also outlines requirements for an integrated, DT-enabled metaverse framework and provides a look ahead into the evolving topic.

With the technological advances, there is an increasing attention on micro-UAVs in the military area as well as in the civilian domain. They are used as swarm (several UAVs) forming a UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) since they are relatively cheap and offer better performance than one aircraft. The UAVs, in a UAS, have to exchange information with each other and with the control station in order to create a clear vision of the swarm situation and the task performance. This exchange is made possible by the application of an ad hoc network between UAVs which is a challenging issue because of the node mobility, the network topology change, and the operation communication requirements in term of quality of service (delay, throughput or loss rate for instance). This paper presents a realistic mobility model designed for UAV ad hoc networks. since evaluating the performances of ad hoc protocols is an important step in order to predict possible problems that can affect the system in the real environment. This mobility model behavior is compared to the well-known mobility model behavior Random-Way Point. It is also compared to real movements traces using several metrics.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading platforms envisioned energy sectors to satisfy the increasing demand for energy. The vision of this paper is not only to trade energy but also to have part of it being shared. Therefore, this paper presents FederatedGrids which is a P2P energy trading and sharing platform inside and across microgrids. Energy sharing allows exchanging energy between the categories of consumers and prosumers in return for future benefits. FederatedGrids platform uses blockchain and federated learning to enable autonomous activities while providing trust and privacy among all participants. Indeed, based on various smart contracts using federated learning, FederatedGrids calculates a prediction of the future energy production and demand allowing the system to autonomously switch between trading and sharing, and enabling the prosumers to make decisions related to their participation in the energy sharing process. Up to our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to create a hybrid energy trading and sharing platform, with the real sharing meaning, and that uses federated learning over the smart contract for energy demand prediction. The experimental results showed a 17.8% decrease in energy cost for consumers and a 76.4% decrease in load over utility grids.

The increasing demand for clean, sustainable and reliable energy sources that are secure and stable requires the integration of renewable and edge energy products with the existing power grid. With the introduction of technological advancements and distributed resources, energy users (aka prosumers) can now generate, store and manage their energy requirements, and share their resources with others. BC is a promising technology that can provide secure and verifiable transactions for P2P energy trading, and promote energy conservation. This article recognizes the best practices for sustainable energy, and highlights the benefits of BC and smart contracts in the energy sector. A distributed trading framework and smart contracts are proposed for future versions of BC and integration with other energy products, and potential solutions are suggested.

Blockchain and fog computing are being evaluated as potential support for software and a wide spectrum of critical applications. This article presents the knowledge of blockchain and fog computing required to improve cyberphysical systems. Emerging challenges and issues are also discussed.

Industrial investments into distributed energy resource technologies are increasing and playing a pivotal role in the global transactive energy, as part of a wider drive to provide a clean and stable source of energy. The management of prosumers, which consume and as well as generate energy, with heterogeneous energy sources is critical for sustainable and efficient energy trading procedures. This article proposes a blockchain-assisted adaptive model, namely SynergyChain, for improving the scalability and decentralization of the prosumer grouping mechanism in the context of peer-to-peer energy trading. Smart contracts are used for storing the transaction information and for the creation of the prosumer groups. SynergyChain integrates a reinforcement learning module to further improve the overall system performance and profitability by creating a self-adaptive grouping technique. The proposed SynergyChain is developed using Python and Solidity and has been tested using Ethereum test nets. The comprehensive analysis using the hourly energy consumption dataset shows a 39.7% improvement in the performance and scalability of the system as compared to the centralized systems. The evaluation results confirm that SynergyChain can reduce the request completion time along with an 18.3% improvement in the overall profitability of the system as compared to its counterparts.