The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased research outputs in telemedicine over the last couple of years. One solution to the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed in literature is to leverage telemedicine for accessing health care remotely. In this survey paper, we review several articles on eHealth and Telemedicine with emphasis on the articles’ focus area, including wireless technologies and architectures in eHealth, communications protocols, Quality of Service, and Experience Standards, among other considerations. In addition, we provide an overview of telemedicine for new readers. This survey reviews several telecommunications technologies currently being proposed along with their standards and challenges. In general, an encompassing survey on the developments in telemedicine technology, standards, and protocols is presented while acquainting researchers with several open issues. Special mention of the state-of-the-art specialist application areas are presented. We conclude the survey paper by presenting important research challenges and potential future directions as they pertain to telemedicine technology.

The ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic have contributed in part to a recent upsurge in the study and development of eHealth systems. Although it is almost impossible to cover all aspects of eHealth in a single discussion, three critical areas have gained traction. These include the need for acceptable eHealth architectures, the development of mobile health (mHealth) technologies, and the need to address eHealth system security concerns. Existing survey articles lack a synthesis of the most recent advancements in the development of architectures, mHealth solutions, and innovative security measures, which are essential components of effective eHealth systems. Consequently, the present article aims at providing an encompassing survey of these three aspects towards the development of successful and efficient eHealth systems. Firstly, we discuss the most recent innovations in eHealth architectures, such as blockchain-, Internet of Things (IoT)-, and cloud-based architectures, focusing on their respective benefits and drawbacks while also providing an overview of how they might be implemented and used. Concerning mHealth and security, we focus on key developments in both areas while discussing other critical topics of importance for eHealth systems. We close with a discussion of the important research challenges and potential future directions as they pertain to architecture, mHealth, and security concerns. This survey gives a comprehensive overview, including the merits and limitations of several possible technologies for the development of eHealth systems. This endeavor offers researchers and developers a quick snapshot of the information necessary during the design and decision-making phases of the eHealth system development lifecycle. Furthermore, we conclude that building a unified architecture for eHealth systems would require combining several existing designs. It also points out that there are still a number of problems to be solved, so more research and investment are needed to develop and deploy functional eHealth systems.

UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs predicted that the world population will increase by 2 billion in 2050 with over 50% from the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Considering the level of poverty and food insecurity in the region, there is an urgent need for a sustainable increase in agricultural produce. However, farming approach in the region is primarily traditional. Traditional farming is characterized by high labor costs, low production, and under/oversupply of farm inputs. All these factors make farming unappealing to many. The use of digital technologies such as broadband, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing, and Big Data Analytics promise improved returns on agricultural investments and could make farming appealing even to the youth. However, initial cost of smart farming could be high. Therefore, development of a dedicated IoT cloud-based platform is imperative. Then farmers could subscribe and have their farms managed on the platform. It should be noted that majority of farmers in SSA are smallholders who are poor, uneducated, and live in rural areas but produce about 80% of the food. They majorly use 2G phones, which are not internet enabled. These peculiarities must be factored into the design of any functional IoT platform that would serve this group. This paper presents the development of such a platform, which was tested with smart irrigation of maize crops in a testbed. Besides the convenience provided by the smart system, it recorded irrigation water saving of over 36% compared to the control method which demonstrates how irrigation is done traditionally.

The fundamental goal of energy harvesting systems is to reduce the need for a wired power supply or battery replacements. Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting has been established as a viable alternative for powering mobile devices without increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission which is a threat to the environment. However, there are challenges facing the effective harvesting of appreciable energy for these devices. Low RF power harvestable from various sources and low radio frequency-direct current (RF-DC) conversion efficiency have made it a very difficult task to harvest sufficient power to drive mobile devices such as smartphones. Lower frequency RF sources could yield appreciable harvestable energy but this comes with the challenge of portable antennas that could match these frequencies. This paper presents various RF energy harvesting techniques in literature and discusses some of the difficulties encountered by researchers while designing RF energy harvesting circuits. The significance of adopting alternative renewable sources to power mobile devices in the face of the looming global energy crisis while avoiding global warming was highlighted. Additionally, suggestions for future work aimed at harvesting enough energy to power smartphones and other mobile devices were presented.

The primary aim of a cognitive radio (CR) system is to optimize spectrum usage by exploiting the existing spectrum holes. Nevertheless, the success of cognitive radio technology is significantly threatened by the primary user emulation attack (PUEA). A rogue secondary user (SU) known as the primary user emulator (PUE) impersonates a legitimate primary user (PU) in a PUEA, thereby preventing other SUs from accessing the spectrum holes. Which leads to the decrease in quality of service (QoS), connection undependability, degraded throughput, energy depletion, and the network experiences a deterioration in its overall performance. In order to alleviate the impact of PUEA on Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), it is necessary to detect and isolate the threat agent (PUE) from the network. In this paper, a method for finding and isolating the PUE is proposed. MATLAB simulation results showed that the presence of PUE caused a significant decrease in the throughput of SUs, from 1 7 10   to 2 56 10  . The throughput was highest at a false alarm (FA) probability of 0.0, indicating no PUE, and decreased as the FA probability increased. At a FA probability of 1, the throughput reached zero, indicating complete takeover of the spectrum by PUE. By isolating the PUE from the network, the other SUs can access the spectrum holes, leading to increased QoS, connection reliability, improved throughput, and efficient energy usage. The presented technique is an important step towards enhancing the security and reliability of CRNs.