Muhammad Waqas

• Ph.D (Information and Communication Engineering)
• Senior Lecturer at University of Geenwich

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), as the standard inter-domain routing protocol, is a distance-vector dynamic routing protocol used for exchanging routing information between distributed Autonomous Systems (AS). BGP nodes, communicating in a distributed dynamic environment, face several security challenges, with trust being one of the most important i...

The surge in smartphone and wearable device usage has propelled the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Among these, e-healthcare stands out as a fundamental service, enabling the remote access and storage of patient-related data on a centralized medical server (MS), and facilitating connections between authorized individuals...

For wearable devices with constrained computational resources, it is typically required to offload processing tasks to more capable servers. However, this practice introduces vulnerabilities to data confidentiality and integrity due to potential malicious network attacks, unreliable servers, and insecure communication channels. A robust mechanism t...

The Digital Twin (DT) technology is considered as a backbone in the Industrial 4.0 revolution as it is playing a vital role in the digitization of various industries. A DT is a virtual representation of a physical entity, thus having the ability to simulate real data generated at physical space to optimize, estimate, control, monitor and forecast s...

With the increasing demand for mobile computing, the requirement for intelligent resource management has also increased. Cloud computing lessens the energy consumption of user equipment, but it increases the latency of the system. Whereas edge computing reduces the latency along with the energy consumption, it has limited resources and cannot proce...

In the cloud-assisted industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), since the cloud server is not always trusted, the leakage of data privacy becomes a critical problem. Dynamic symmetric searchable encryption (DSSE) allows for the secure retrieval of outsourced data stored on cloud servers while ensuring data privacy. Forward privacy and backward privacy...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a heterogeneous network composed of numerous dynamically connected devices. While it brings convenience, the IoT also faces serious challenges in data security. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptography method that supports fine-grained access control, offering a solution to th...

The DNS over HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) (DoH) is a new technology that encrypts DNS traffic, enhancing the privacy and security of end-users. However, the adoption of DoH is still facing several research challenges, such as ensuring security, compatibility, standardization, performance, privacy, and increasing user awareness. DoH si...

Although 5G and beyond communication technology empower a large number of edge heterogeneous devices and applications, the stringent security remains a major concern when dealing with the millions of edge computing tasks in the highly dynamic heterogeneous networks (HDHNs). Blockchains contribute significantly to addressing security challenges by g...

The use of Internet of Drones (IoD) technology has surged across various domains such as logistics, surveying, industrial inspections, emergency response, security, infrastructure monitoring, crop management, and more. However, real-time communication with drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the IoD environment occurs over an insecure open...

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) supported by smart vehicles have revolutionized modern transportation, offering a wide range of applications and services, such as electronic toll collection, collision avoidance alarms, real-time parking management, and traffic planning. However, the open communication channels among various entities, inclu...

Blockchain technology is used often as a merger with other technologies to achieve a high level of security, privacy, and robustness and to handle issues such as maliciousness of nodes, privacy leakage, the selfishness of nodes, communication delays, and high execution and transaction costs. There is currently a lack of a comprehensive system for a...

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standard inter-domain routing protocol for the Internet that conveys network layer reachability information and establishes routes to different destinations. The BGP protocol exhibits security design defects, such as an unconditional trust mechanism and the default acceptance of BGP route announcements from peers...

Network updates have become increasingly prevalent since the broad adoption of software-defined networks (SDNs) in data centers. Modern TCP designs, including cutting-edge TCP variants DCTCP, CUBIC, and BBR, however, are not resilient to network updates that provoke flow rerouting. In this paper, we first demonstrate that popular TCP implementation...

The application of Intelligent Internet of Things (IIoT) in constructing distribution station areas strongly supports platform transformation, upgrade, and intelligent integration. The sensing layer of IIoT comprises the edge convergence layer and the end sensing layer, with the former using intelligent fusion terminals for real-time data collectio...

The widespread adoption of fifth-generation mobile networks has spurred the rapid advancement of mobile edge computing (MEC). By decentralizing computing and storage resources to the network edge, MEC significantly enhances real-time data access services and enables efficient processing of large-scale dynamic data on resource-limited devices. Howev...

With the ever-increasing dataset size and data storage capacity, there is a strong need to build systems that can effectively utilize these vast datasets to extract valuable information. Large datasets often exhibit sparsity and pose cold start problems, necessitating the development of responsible recommender systems. Knowledge graphs have utility...

Existing fully-supervised semantic segmentation methods have achieved good performance. However, they all rely on high-quality pixel-level labels. To minimize the annotation costs, weakly-supervised methods or semi-supervised methods are proposed. When such methods are applied to the infrared ship image segmentation, inaccurate object localization...

Emotion detection systems play a crucial role in enhancing human-computer interaction. Existing systems predominantly rely on machine learning techniques. This study introduces a novel emotion detection method that employs deep learning techniques to identify five basic human emotions and the pleasure dimensions (valence) associated with these emot...

Although attribute-based signcryption (ABSC) offers a promising technology to ensure the security of IoT data sharing, it faces a twofold challenge in practical implementation, namely, the linearly increasing computation and communication costs and the heavy load of single authority based key management. To this end, we propose a Secure and Lightwe...

Cloud computing is an innovative technique that offers shared resources for stock cache and server management. Cloud computing saves time and monitoring costs for any organization and turns technological solutions for large-scale systems into server-to-service frameworks. However, just like any other technology, cloud computing opens up many forms...

This work presents a novel approach by utilizing Heterogeneous Activation Neural Networks (HA-NNs) to evolve the weights of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for reinforcement learning in console and arcade computer games like Atari's Breakout and Sonic the Hedgehog. It is the first study to explore the potential of HA-NNs as potent ANNs in solving...

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the 5G era has resulted in increased security vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks, underscoring the importance of network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). However, existing NIDS have limitations in terms of accuracy, recall rates, false alarm rates, and generalization capabilities, and th...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2023.09.002

Road traffic injuries cause considerable life and economic losses to individuals, their families, and nations as a whole. To avoid road accidents, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) play a vital role by enhancing transportation systems to make them intelligent. To enhance road safety, emergency message dissemination schemes are indispensable in VAN...

Wearable computing has shown tremendous potential to revolutionize and uplift the standard of our lives. However, researchers and field experts have often noted several privacy and security vulnerabilities in the field of wearable computing. In order to tackle these problems, various schemes have been proposed in the literature to improve the effic...

In-vehicle network security plays a vital role in ensuring the secure information transfer between vehicle and Internet. The existing research is still facing great difficulties in balancing the conflicting factors for the in-vehicle network security and hence to improve intrusion detection performance. To challenge this issue, we construct a many-...

Smart manufacturing is transforming the manufacturing industry by enhancing productivity and quality, driving growth in the global economy. The Internet of Things (IoT) has played a crucial role in realizing Industry 4.0, where machines can communicate and interact in real-time. Despite these advancements, security remains a major challenge in deve...

This research aims to design a smart parking system using cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve the process of finding parking spaces in urban areas. The proposed system utilizes sensors and microcontrollers in each parking space to provide real-time data to users through a mobile application. The primary objective of our resea...

Given the actual needs for detecting multiple features of butterflies in natural ecosystems, this paper proposes a model of weakly-supervised butterfly detection based on a saliency map (WBD-SM) to enhance the accuracy of butterfly detection in the ecological environment as well as to overcome the difficulty of fine annotation. Our proposed model f...

It is anticipated that sixth‐generation (6G) systems would present new security challenges while offering improved features and new directions for security in vehicular communication, which may result in the emergence of a new breed of adaptive and context‐aware security protocol. Physical layer security solutions can compete for low‐complexity, lo...

Deep kernel mapping support vector machine (DNMSVM) has achieved good results in numerous tasks by mapping the input from a low-dimensional space to a high-dimensional space and then using support vector machine for classification. However, it did not consider the connection of different spaces and increased the model parameters. To improve the cla...

Emotion identification from text has recently gained attention due to its versatile ability to analyze human-machine interaction. This work focuses on detecting emotions from textual data. Languages, like English, Chinese, and German are widely used for text classification, however, limited research is done on resource-poor oriental languages. Roma...

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an effective computing tool to cope with the explosive growth of data traffic. It plays a vital role in improving the quality of service for user task computing. However, the existing solutions rarely address all the significant factors that impact the quality of service. To challenge this problem, a trusted many-obje...

The Internet of vehicles (IoV) is increasingly being used to realize the vision of intelligent transportation systems with the rapid development of computation and communication technologies. However, numerous IoV applications rely on a central unit for storing and processing information and medi- ators for wireless transmission. This can lead to t...

Inspired by the promising potential of re-configurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided transmission in achieving the vision of 6th Generation (6G) network, we analyze the security model for a vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) network by considering multiple RISs (M-RIS) on buildings to act as passive relays at fixed distances from a source. In addi...

With the widespread popularity of mobile terminals in the Internet of things (IoT), the demand for cross-domain access of mobile terminals between different regions has also increased significantly. The nature of wireless communication media makes mobile terminals vulnerable to security threats in cross-domain access. Identity authentication is a p...

Currently, the deep integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing has improved the computing capability of the IoT perception layer. Existing offloading techniques for edge computing suffer from the single problem of solidifying offloading policies. Based on this, combined with the characteristics of deep reinforcement learning, th...

Emergency message (EM) dissemination is a significant process in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and plays a vital role in road safety. Nonetheless, EMs’ dissemination while avoiding broadcast storms poses a considerable challenge. Moreover, selecting optimal cooperative forwarders is also challenging because of unreliability, high end-to-end de...

Infrared ship target segmentation is one of the key technologies for automatically detecting ship targets in ocean monitoring. However, it is a challenging work to achieve accurate target segmentation from the infrared ship image. To improve its segmentation performance, we present an Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network (ADANet) for infrared ship...

The next-generation Internet of vehicles (IoVs) seamlessly connects humans, vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and service platforms, to improve road safety, enhance transit efficiency, and deliver comfort while conserving the environ- ment. Currently, numerous entities communicate in the IoVs environment via insecure public channels that are suscept...

An edge cloud architecture plays a key role in improving the user task computing service system by combining the powerful data processing capability of cloud centres with the low latency of edge computing. Existing methods for maximizing the efficiency of an edge cloud architecture take into account time and task parameters but ignore other factors...

The incorporation of network data analytics can made a significant enhancement in the performance of 5G cellular networks. It enables the effective analysis of network data and the detection of abnormalities using machine and deep learning models. In this study, we used ensemble learning methods to improve the accuracy of network prediction. Anomal...

Collaborative resource scheduling between edge terminals and cloud centers is regarded as a promising means of effectively completing computing tasks and enhancing quality of service. In this paper, to further improve the achievable performance, the edge cloud resource scheduling (ECRS) problem is transformed into a multi-objective Markov decision...

The reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a new technology that can be utilized to provide security to vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications at the physical layer. In this paper, we achieve a higher key generation rate for V2V communications at lower cost and computational complexity. We investigate the use of a passive RIS as a relay, to...

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), high mobility, high-density, and random distribution of vehicles are crucial factors affecting the performance of a routing scheme. High mobility causes frequent changes in network topology, whereas high-density causes communication congestion due to channel contention. Moreover, routing decisions based on a r...

Many advancements are being made in vehicular networks, such as self-driving, dynamic route scheduling, real- time traffic condition monitoring, and on-board infotainment services. However, these services require high computation power with high precision results and can be met by using mobile edge computing (MEC) mechanisms for vehicular networks....

The rapid growth of various vehicular apps such as automotive navigation and in-car entertainment has brought the explosion of vehicular social data. Such a growth has given rise to a huge challenge of maintaining quality of cloud storage services for the whole period of storage in vehicular social networks. As a result, data integrity faces risks...

In smart grids (SGs), the systematic utilization of consumer energy data while maintaining its privacy is of paramount importance. This research addresses this problem by energy theft detection while preserving the privacy of client data. In particular, this research identifies centralized models as more accurate in predicting energy theft in SGs b...

With the recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT), the amount of data collected has expanded tremendously, resulting in a higher demand for data storage, computational capacity, and real-time processing capabilities. Cloud computing has traditionally played an important role in establishing IoT. However, fog computing has recently emerge...

With the development of sensor technology and wireless communication technology, edge computing has a wider range of applications. The privacy protection of edge computing is of great significance. In the edge computing system, in order to ensure the credibility of the source of terminal data, mobile edge computing (MEC) needs to verify the signatu...

The Smart grid employs information and communication networks to collect data on energy production and consumption, and then utilize it to improve efficiency, reliability, economic benefit, power generation, and distribution sustainability. However, in SG networks the components communicate over insecure public channels, raising severe security con...

The rise in demand for underwater wireless communication networks (UWCN) has been driven by the emergence of new applications including unmanned underwater vehicles, deep-sea exploration, maritime and underwater archaeology research, and diver communications. For various applications, underwater network lifetime must be long, since unlike terrestri...

Cyber-physical wireless systems have surfaced as an important data communication and networking research area. It is an emerging discipline that allows effective monitoring and efficient real-time communication between the cyber and physical worlds by embedding computer software and integrating communication and networking technologies. Due to thei...

In this paper, to improve the efficiency of infrared (IR) ship target tracking, an efficient SiamRPN++ method based on AlexNet with cross connection and spatial transformer network is proposed. The cross-connection method integrates the features of shallow layers and the deep layers to increase the spatial information of the output features. To red...

Genetic algorithm (GA) is a nature-inspired algorithm to produce best possible solution by selecting the fittest individual from a pool of possible solutions. Like most of the optimization techniques, the GA can also stuck in the local optima, producing a suboptimal solution. This work presents a novel metaheuristic optimizer named as the binary ch...

As the number of devices joining the Internet of Things (IoT) keeps increasing, vast amounts of data are being mined, and data sharing can exploit their considerable value. Owing to its advantages of decentralization, consistency, and traceability, blockchain technology can be used to build an efficient and reliable IoT data sharing system. To faci...

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things, more and more social sectors and smart devices are connected to the Internet of Things. This has led to a spurt of data growth and posed challenges to data security. To solve this problem, the Internet of Things needs a more secure and efficient storage method. Nowadays, one of the most imp...

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is used for compu-tationally complex applications by offloading it to the nearby edge server either partially or entirely. The problem arises of selecting whether the component is to be offloaded to the mobile edge server (MES) for execution, or it needs to be executed locally. Therefore, we propose a time-efficient deci...

Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising technology that attains significant consideration in diverse industrial areas, i.e., agriculture, engineering, logistics, trading, ecological examining , security surveillance, energy, and healthcare. IoT gains much more attention with the rapid advancement of wireless communication and sensor networks as mil...

Reliable emergency message (EM) transmission in vehicular adhoc networks (VANETs) necessitates an effective routing scheme. Position-based routing is considered more suitable for VANETs for not having to maintain any routing table or sharing connection states with neighbors. However, position-based routing is challenging in VANETs because vehicles...

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) offers a promising technique to fulfil the high data demand and connectivity of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and 5G communications because it owns valuable and unknown spectrum resources. Using massive antennas with recently introduced drone-enabled aerial computing platforms, n...

Security is one of the biggest challenges concerning networks and communications. The problem becomes aggravated with the proliferation of wireless devices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising solution and a volume of literature exists on the methodological studies of AI to resolve the security challenge. In this survey, we pres...

The modern intelligent transportation system opts for accident prediction modules as a critical aspect for road safety. Where, an accident is predicted before it actually happens and precautionary measures be taken for its avoidance. Accident prediction methods’ analysis is also popular for critical infrastructure protection. Recently, Deep Learnin...

Fog computing is an emerging technology that aims at reducing the load on cloud data centers by migrating some computation and storage towards end-users. It leverages the intermediate servers for local processing and storage while making it possible to offload part of the computation and storage to the cloud. Inspired by the benefits of fog computi...

Time series classification is one of the most critical and challenging problems in data mining, which exists widely in various fields and has essential research significance. However, to improve the accuracy of time series classification is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Feature Fusion Network (AFFNet) to enhance th...

Emotions play an important role in human cognition and are commonly associated with perception, logical decision making, human interaction, and intelligence. Emotion and stress detection is an emerging topic of interest and importance in the research community. With the availability of portable, cheap, and reliable sensor devices, researchers are o...

The revolution brought about by intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) systems has impacted every sphere of life, including but not being limited to smart hospitals, transportation, industry, grid, house, and agriculture. IoT systems traditionally are plagued with security vulnerabilities and scalability issues. In recent years, blockchain technology...

This paper reports numerical modeling of perovskite solar cell which has been knotted with Distributed Bragg Reflector pairs to extract high energy efficiency. The geometry of the proposed cells is simulated with three different kinds of perovskite materials including CH3NH3PbI3, CH3NH3PbBr3, and CH3NH3SnI3. The toxic perovskite material based on L...

One of the significant challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) is the provisioning of guaranteed security and privacy, considering the fact that IoT devices are resource-limited. Oftentimes, in IoT applications, remote users need to obtain real-time data, with guaranteed security and privacy, from resource-limited network nodes through the publi...

As a new generation of information technology, blockchain plays an increasingly prominent role in social operation, bringing significant changes to the economic process, social organization and governance. Blockchain application scenarios are complex and diverse, with many computing nodes, scattered locations and dynamic topology changes. Security...

Blockchain has the characteristics of openness and decentralization and faces many security threats in application scenarios. Apply trusted computing technology to establish trusted blockchain boundaries and build a systematic security protection framework to meet the security requirements in blockchain application scenarios. Therefore, this paper...

In the current competitive corporate world, organizations rely on their products' advertisements for surpassing competitors in reaching out to a larger pool of customers. This forces companies to focus on advertisement quality. This work presents a content-based advertisement viewability prediction framework using Artificial Intelligence (AI) metho...

Neural network architecture search automatically configures a set of network architectures according to the targeted rules. Thus, it relieves the human-dependent effort and repetitive resources consumption for designing neural network architectures and makes the task of finding the optimum network architecture with better performance much more acce...

Efficient task scheduling is required to attain high performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous computing systems. An application can be considered as a task grid represented using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Solving such DAG representing a scheduling problem is an NP-complete task. The primary concern in this problem domain is to reduce...

The modern computing applications are presently adapting to the convenient availability of huge and diverse data for making their pattern recognition methods smarter. Identification of dominant emotion solely based on the text data generated by the humans is essential for the modern human-computer interaction. This work presents a multimodal text-k...

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be very successful in learning task-specific computer vision features. To integrate features from different layers in standard CNNs, we present a fusing framework of shortcut convolutional neural networks (S-CNNs). This framework can fuse arbitrary scale features by adding weighted shortcut connec...

Availability of suitable and validated data is a key issue in multiple domains for implementing machine learning methods. Higher data dimensionality has adverse effects on the learning algorithm's performance. This work aims to design a method that preserves most of the unique information related to the data with minimum number of features. Address...

The enhancement of spectrum utilization efficiency (SUE) is a critical objective in fifth generation networks-enabled Internet of Things (5G-IoT) for providing communication opportunities to plethora of 5G-IoT devices within the already scarce spectrum. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) with interweave and underlay modes are foreseen to achieve this...

A large amount of data that IoT applications deal, is users’ Private data, and their privacy is a significant issue. However, if users are not sure about the security of their data, they will not desire to use such applications. The goal of this study is to improve the security and privacy of users in the Internet of Things (IoTs) setting. Since, t...

The rapid developments of artificial intelligent (AI) is being transformed for its extensive use-cases, people-centered intelligent systems focusing on care delivery, research encounter complex problems related to improve the overall infrastructure and management of intelligent delivery service; for instance, bringing transformation in healthcare s...

Data backup is a pervasive strategy adopted by cloud service providers (CSPs) to avoid potential risks of data loss. As a result, a CSP normally maintains multiple replicas for each piece of data on geographically distributed servers to improve reliability. A key problem of this replication technique is that users will be charged more when more rep...

Fog computing is a revolutionary technology for the next generation to bridge the gap between cloud data centers and end-users. Fog computing is not a counterfeit for cloud computing but a persuasive counterpart. It also accredits by utilizing the network edge while still rendering the possibility to interact with the cloud. Nevertheless, the featu...

Safety and security of humans is an important concern in every aspect. With the advancement in engineering, sciences, and technology (unfortunately) new methods to harm humans have also been introduced. At the same time, scientists are paying attention to the security aspects by developing new software and hardware gadgets. In comparison to the sys...