In recent times, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has received significant attention owing to its numerous applications in various mission critical services, such as healthcare, military monitoring, public safety systems, and forest monitoring. However, sensor node’s low computational power and inadequate advancements in battery design hinder resource-rigorous applications from fully exploiting WSN capabilities. The trend of shifting computations and storage to remote clouds offers the opportunity to integrate WSNs into the cloud to mitigate their limitations. The Sensor Cloud augments WSN capabilities of remote sensing and monitoring while exploiting resource-rich cloud infrastructure. To date, numerous solutions have been proposed to handle the integration concerns of WSNs with the cloud. However, a comprehensive study that covers various Sensor Cloud aspects in terms of architecture, network dynamics, heterogeneity, communication patterns, data management, and security, is still lacking. To fill this gap, state-of-the-art sensor cloud integration frameworks are analyzed in this article. Moreover, a detailed thematic taxonomy is presented to classify existing sensor cloud frameworks while focusing in service oriented and client server architectures. Related features and critical aspects of existing frameworks are inspected through a qualitative analysis based on the parameters selected from the literature and extracted from the taxonomy. Several research opportunities in this research domain are suggested to assist researchers in identifying and designing optimal resource sensor cloud integration frameworks to host emerging applications.

For the betterment of human life, smart Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems are needed for the new era. IoT is evolving swiftly for its applications in the smart environment, including smart airports, smart buildings, smart manufacturing, smart homes, etc. A smart home environment includes resource-constrained devices that are interlinked, monitored, controlled, and analyzed with the help of the Internet. In a distributed smart environment, devices with low and high computational power work together and require authenticity. Therefore, a computationally efficient and secure protocol is needed. The authentication protocol is employed to ensure that authorized smart devices communicate with the smart environment and are accessible by authorized personnel only. We have designed a novel, lightweight secure protocol for a smart home environment. The introduced novel protocol can withstand well-known attacks and is effective with respect to computation and communication complexities. Comparative, formal, and informal analyses were conducted to draw the comparison between the introduced protocol and previous state-of-the-art protocols.

The interconnected cloud (Intercloud) federation is an emerging paradigm that revolutionizes the scalable service provision of geographically distributed resources. Large-scale distributed resources require well-coordinated and automated frameworks to facilitate service provision in a seamless and systematic manner. Unquestionably, standalone service providers must communicate and federate their cloud sites with other vendors to enable the infinite pooling of resources. The pooling of these resources provides uninterpretable services to increasingly growing cloud users more efficiently, and ensures an improved Service Level Agreement (SLA). However, the research of Intercloud resource management is in its infancy. Therefore, standard interfaces, protocols, and uniform architectural components need to be developed for seamless interaction among federated clouds. In this study, we propose a distributed meta-brokering-enabled scheduling framework for provision of user application services in the federated cloud environment. Modularized architecture of the proposed system with uniform configuration in participating resource sites orchestrate the critical operations of resource management effectively, and form the federation schema. Overlaid meta-brokering instances are implemented on the top of local resource brokers to keep the global functionality isolated. These instances in overlay topology communicate in a P2P manner to maintain decentralization, high scalability, and load manageability. The proposed framework has been implemented and evaluated by extending the Java-based CloudSim 3.0.3 simulation application programming interfaces (APIs). The presented results validate the proposed model and its efficiency to facilitate user application execution with the desired QoS parameters.

The modern innovation called the Internet of Things (IoT) empowers individuals to connect to anybody and anything at any point, wherever. The application of the IoT in smart cities concerning smart healthcare management can improve patient welfare, user acceptance, the standard of living, and accurate illness monitoring. Powered wheelchairs (PW) with sensors, computers, and other connected assistive technologies are called smart wheelchairs. Smart wheelchairs with sensing abilities are intended to offer universal connectivity using cloud and edge computing technology. Numerous outstanding people were impacted by paralyzing phenomena, including Stephen Hawking and Max Brito. The issue of legitimacy is one of the most important difficulties in e-health applications, because of how sensitive the technology is, and this needs to be appropriately handled. To safeguard the data transport, usage, and interchange between sensor nodes/smart wheelchairs and servers, e-health applications require an authentication method. As all conversations use wireless channels, e-health apps are exposed to various vulnerabilities. Additionally, the IoT has limited computational and power capacity limitations. To combat the various security risks, the present research offers a user authentication technique that is efficient and ensures anonymity. The suggested method creates a safe connection for the authorized entity and forbids unauthorized entities from accessing the Internet of Things sensor nodes. The suggested approach has lower communication and computation overheads than the traditional techniques, making it more effective. In addition, the security verification of the presented protocol is scrutinized through AVISPA. The proposed scheme, on average, requires only 12.4% more computation cost to execute. Compared to the existing approaches, the suggested protocol’s extra computational cost can be compensated for by its enhanced security, while the suggested method’s communication cost is 46.3% smaller.