The paradigm shift towards Smart Grids, Smart Buildings, Smart Monitoring, and Operation has driven researchers to propose innovative solutions for designing and maintaining energy systems. Although the integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) supports sustainability goals, it also introduces vulnerabilities to unpredictable challenges such as grid stability, energy storage requirements, and infrastructure modernization. Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a transformative tool to address these challenges, offering opportunities to enhance energy efficiency, and system design in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The emphasis on these goals necessitates the study of new system designs that prioritize energy efficiency. Building on its proven success, researchers are increasingly adopting ML-driven approaches to accelerate advances in energy systems. This work presents a detailed review of current ML-driven research trends in energy systems, outlines the associated challenges, and provides potential research directions and recommendations. Unlike the existing literature, which focuses primarily on ML applications in the RES domain, this study offers a holistic perspective on ML-driven approaches across various aspects of energy systems, including energy policy and sustainability. It aims to serve as a comprehensive resource, bridging the gap between research advancements and practical implementations in energy systems through ML-driven innovation.

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the world in the last decade. Today millions of devices are connected to each other utilizing IoT technology in one way or the other. With the significant growth in IoT devices, the provision of IoT security is imperative. Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is a network layer protocol, specially designed for routing in IoT devices. RPL protocol faces many attacks such as selective forwarding attacks, blackhole attacks, sybil attacks, wormhole attacks, and sinkhole attacks. All these attacks pose great threats to IoT networks and can substantially affect the performance of the network. In this work, a comprehensive review of internal attacks on the network layer is presented. Specifically, we focus on the literature that considers presenting solutions for the detection and prevention of sinkhole attacks. We reviewed the state-of-the-art works and different performance parameters like energy consumption, scalability, threshold value, packet delivery ratio, and throughput. Moreover, we also present a detailed analysis of machine learning-based algorithms and techniques proposed for the security of RPL protocol against internal attacks.

Ubiquitous computing turns into a reality with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) adopted to connect massive numbers of smart and autonomous devices for various applications. 6G-enabled IoT technology provides a platform for information collection and processing at high speed and with low latency. However, there are still issues that need to be addressed in an extended connectivity environment, particularly the security and privacy domain challenges. In addition, the traditional centralized architecture is often unable to address problems associated with access control management, interoperability of different devices, the possible existence of a single point of failure, and extensive computational overhead. Considering the evolution of decentralized access control mechanisms, it is necessary to provide robust security and privacy in various IoT-enabled industrial applications. The emergence of blockchain technology has changed the way information is shared. Blockchain can establish trust in a secure and distributed platform while eliminating the need for third-party authorities. We believe the coalition of 6G-enabled IoT and blockchain can potentially address many problems. This paper is dedicated to discussing the advantages, challenges, and future research directions of integrating 6G-enabled IoT and blockchain technology for various applications such as smart homes, smart cities, healthcare, supply chain, vehicle automation, etc.

Malicious Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) pose a significant cybersecurity threat by carrying out attacks such as phishing and malware propagation. Conventional malicious URL detection methods, relying on blacklists and heuristics, often struggle to identify new and obfuscated malicious URLs. To address this challenge, machine learning and deep learning have been leveraged to enhance detection capabilities, albeit relying heavily on large and frequently updated datasets. Furthermore, the efficacy of these methods is intrinsically tied to the quality of the training data, a requirement that becomes increasingly challenging to fulfill in real-world scenarios due to constraints such as data scarcity, privacy concerns, and the dynamic nature of evolving cyber threats. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework for malicious URL detection based on predefined static feature classification by allocating priority coefficients and feature evaluation methods. Our feature classification encompasses 42 classes, including blacklist, lexical, host-based, and content-based features. To validate our framework, we collected a dataset of 5000 real-world URLs from prominent phishing and malware websites, namely URLhaus and PhishTank. We assessed our framework’s performance using three supervised machine learning methods: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Bayesian Network (BN). The results demonstrate that our framework outperforms these methods, achieving an impressive detection accuracy of 98.95% and a precision value of 98.60%. Furthermore, we conducted a benchmarking analysis against three comprehensive malicious URL detection methods (PDRCNN, the Li method, and URLNet), demonstrating that our proposed framework excels in terms of accuracy and precision. In conclusion, our novel malicious URL detection framework substantially enhances accuracy, significantly bolstering cybersecurity defences against emerging threats.

Clustering has been suggested as an effective technique to enhance the performance of multicasting networks. Typically, a cluster head is selected to broadcast the cached content to its cluster members utilizing Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. However, some users can attain better performance by being connected with the Evolved Node B (eNB) rather than being in the clusters. In this article, we apply machine learning algorithms, namely Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Deep Neural Network to identify the users that should be serviced by the eNB. We therefore propose a mixed-mode content distribution scheme where the cluster heads and eNB service the two segregated groups of users to improve the performance of existing clustering schemes. A D2D-enabled multicasting scenario has been set up to perform a comprehensive simulation study that demonstrates that by utilizing the mixed-mode scheme, the performance of individual users, as well as the whole network, improve significantly in terms of throughput, energy consumption, and fairness. This study also demonstrates the trade-off between eNB loading and performance improvement for various parameters.