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BHMUS: Blockchain Based Secure Outdoor Health Monitoring Scheme Using UAV in Smart City
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an emerging technology that becomes popular not only in military operation but also in civil applications. Internet of things (IoT) is another popular technology which brings automation in our daily life. Like other areas, IoT also exposes its potential in healthcare. Using IoT sensors, it becomes easy to monitor the health of a user remotely. UAV consolidated with mobile edge computing (MEC) can provide real-time services in outdoor health monitoring. However, communication among them surrounds with cyber threats and data integrity issue. Blockchain is a data structure in which data are shared among peers. In this paper, a blockchain based secure outdoor health monitoring scheme using UAV is proposed for a smart city. In the proposed scheme, health data (HD) are accumulated from users wearable sensors and these HD are transmitted to the nearest MEC server via UAV. Prior to transmitting to MEC, HD experience encryption in order to provide protection against cyber threats. Moreover, after arriving at MEC, HD are diagnosed and if any abnormalities are found in the user’s health, MEC server notifies the user and the nearest hospitals. When the processing is completed, HD are stored in blockchain with the consent of validators. Finally, simulation results and experimental set up are discussed in order to manifest the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
... The communication between MEC and UAVs can face some sort of security as well as data integrity issues. So, Islam et al. [87] proposed a BCbased secure real-time outdoor health monitoring. The users in the network can have wearable sensors with them which are connected to UAVs. ...
... Similarly, Islam et al. [88] proposed the same idea as [87] of implementing the UAV with MEC. Although the idea is the same, the way of implementation is quite different. ...
... If the hospital is nearby to the car it can alert the hospital and can drive the person to the hospital itself. The implementation of 5G is required here to establish low latency Fig. 9 Structure of healthcare model and data collection [87] Cluster Computing communication because even a slight delay can risk a person's life. Their system cannot just make human life more secure yet in addition is a key to deal with significant health emergency issues. ...
In this era of modern digital technologies, the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) is omnipresent and can be used for varied purposes. However , these devices have scalability, security, and connection issues. To address the IoV security issues, BC technology is a viable solution. BC offers decentralization, transparency, immutability, and privacy, which can be useful to IoVs. The 5G technologies have not been fully commercialized and the researchers have started exploring the 6G technologies. The 6G technologies can help provide ultra-low latency communication between the devices. It also supports communication in heterogeneous networks like IoVs in various application scenarios such as healthcare, smart city, and traffic management. Motivated from the above discussion, we present a survey on the adoption of BC in IoVs underlying 6G communication. We have also explored various privacy and security concerns in IoVs, which can be perfectly addressed via BC technology. The 6G communication takes care of latency, reliability, and connectivity issues. We have categorized the existing literature based on the taxonomy and presented a comparative study of all the existing state-of-the-art approaches based on their merits and demerits. Finally, we have highlighted some of the open issues and research challenges that opens the doors for beginners who are willing to start work in this amazing area.
... Cryptographic technologies, such as the ECC encryption algorithm, are used to keep the patient's data private. Jan et al. [41] also provided a simple mutual authentication method for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (I-CPS) to safeguard wearable devices' and their data's privacy. The approach is based on client-server interaction architecture and provides symmetric encryption for secure interactions between entities. ...
... Jan et al. [41] also provided a lightweight mutual authentication solution for protecting the privacy of wearable devices and their data in I-CPS. The technique is built on a client-server interaction architecture and offers safe sessions among entities by using symmetric encryption. ...
The healthcare industry is rapidly adapting to new computing environments and technologies. With academics increasingly committed to developing and enhancing healthcare solutions that combine the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, there is a greater need than ever to adequately monitor the data being acquired, shared, processed, and stored. The growth of cloud, IoT, and edge computing models presents severe data privacy concerns, especially in the healthcare sector. However, rigorous research to develop appropriate data privacy solutions in the healthcare sector is still lacking. This paper discusses the current state of privacy-preservation solutions in IoT and edge healthcare applications. It identifies the common strategies often used to include privacy by the intelligent edges and technologies in healthcare systems. Furthermore, the study addresses the technical complexity, efficacy, and sustainability limits of these methods. The study also highlights the privacy issues and current research directions that have driven the IoT and edge healthcare solutions, with which more insightful future applications are encouraged.
... In addition to wearable device monitoring, double monitoring with a camera will increase the accuracy of action recognition. In [110], data collected by wearable devices was transferred to a nearby edge using an UAV. After the data were transferred to the edge, they were processed using various algorithms and methods to extract insights and identify any potential issues or anomalies. ...
... Deep learning, Blockchain [76,103,105,110] To enhance security, it is important to identify abnormal actions among people in both outdoor and indoor environments ...
Smart cities are being developed worldwide with the use of technology to improve the quality of life of citizens and enhance their safety. Video surveillance is a key component of smart city infrastructure, as it involves the installation of cameras at strategic locations throughout the city for monitoring public spaces and providing real-time surveillance footage to law enforcement and other city representatives. Video surveillance systems have evolved rapidly in recent years, and are now integrated with advanced technologies like deep learning, blockchain, edge computing, and cloud computing. This study provides a comprehensive overview of video surveillance systems in smart cities, as well as the functions and challenges of those systems. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of video surveillance systems in smart cities and to provide insights into how they could be used to enhance safety, security, and the overall quality of life for citizens.
... A blockchain with a healthiness monitoring system (BHMUS) presented by Islam et al. in [130], in which data of health (HD) gathered from patients' wearable sensors by the assist of a UAV. Before transmitting HD, a patient encodes HD using UAVs public-key. ...
... MEC decodes and identifies HD for discovering irregularities in that patient's body conditions. If the servers of MEC discover any problem in HD, then it transmits a notice to the patient and nearest hospital for the crisis [130]. At last, the authors are finishing the analysis, server of MEC records HD in the blockchain. ...
Most natural disasters are consequences of hurricanes, floods, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes, and can severely disturb traditional communications networks and interrupt infrastructure of physical interconnection. After a disaster, communication failures are one of the essential causes of sufferers. To deal with this problem, offering “connectivity from the sky” is a novel and creative development. Aerial communications have been examined through the assessment and the design of the stratospheric platform capable of providing numerous types of wireless services. Drones, low and high-altitude platforms, airships, aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are regarded as applicants for organizing aerial communications supplementing the infrastructure of global interaction. Aerial communication devices are vulnerable to being physically hijacked, destroyed, or lost. Therefore, security is a crucial issue in aerial communication networks. The blockchain technology is a potential solution candidate to tackle this issue. Blockchain is a decentralized and disseminated ledger, guards the distributed information using methods of cryptography, for example, public-key encryption and hash functions. It can use for guaranteeing the reliability of the data stored and for enhancing the transparency and security of aerial communication networks. This paper presents a survey on the integration of Blockchain with Aerial Communications (BAC). First, we study aerial communication networks and their current security issues, blockchain and its advantages, the feasibility and opportunity of applying the blockchain to resolve the current security issue in aerial communication networks. Next, we discuss current related solutions for applying the blockchain to resolve the current security issue in aerial communication networks in detail. We classify the solutions, compare and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we recommend some research directions for future investigations.
... We present the recent relevant studies that consider the previously mentioned key technologies for enabling heterogeneous smart city applications. In [118], the authors developed a blockchain scheme for outdoor health applications in smart cities. The users' wearable sensors generated health data (HD). ...
The concept of smart cities, which aim to enhance the quality of urban life through innovative technologies and policies, has gained significant momentum in recent years. As we approach the era of next-generation smart cities, it becomes crucial to explore the key enabling technologies that will shape their development. This work reviews the leading technologies driving the future of smart cities. The work begins by introducing the main requirements of different smart city applications; then, the enabling technologies are presented. This work highlights the transformative potential of the Internet of things (IoT) to facilitate data collection and analysis to improve urban infrastructure and services. As a complementary technology, distributed edge computing brings computational power closer to devices, reducing the reliance on centralized data centers. Another key technology is virtualization, which optimizes resource utilization, enabling multiple virtual environments to run efficiently on shared hardware. Software-defined networking (SDN) emerges as a pivotal technology that brings flexibility and scalability to smart city networks, allowing for dynamic network management and resource allocation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is another approach for managing smart cities by enabling predictive analytics, automation, and smart decision making based on vast amounts of data. Lastly, the blockchain is introduced as a promising approach for smart cities to achieve the required security. The review concludes by identifying potential research directions to address the challenges and complexities brought about by integrating these key enabling technologies.
... To address these security concerns, researchers have proposed the use of blockchain technology to secure the transmission of data from autonomous systems. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger that can securely record transactions, such as data transmission from autonomous systems [12,13]. The decentralized nature of blockchain makes it resistant to tampering and interference because there is no single point of failure that attackers can target [14]. ...
Blockchain technology is increasingly used to design trustworthy and reliable platforms for sharing information in a plethora of industries. It is a decentralized system that acts as an immutable record for storing data. It has the potential to disrupt a range of fields that rely on data, including autonomous systems like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this paper, we propose a framework based on blockchain and distributed ledger technology to improve transmission time and provide a secured and trusted method for UAVs to transfer data to the consumer efficiently while maintaining data reliability. The results show that our framework enables fast, easy, and seamless interactions between UAVs data providers and enhances privacy and security, with elapsed time being a key factor. The simulation of the framework revealed that the elapsed time during the transfer of the data via Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and the proposed blockchain framework are 1312, 929, and 674 s, respectively.
... The authors proposed a safe method for tracking health in outdoor environments that integrates blockchain technology, Mobile Edge Computing, drones and Under this proposed system, users' devices collect their health data, which are then transmitted to a Mobile Edge Computing server by a UAV. The health information is safeguarded from cyberattacks before being sent to the MEC [63]. 11. ...
IoT (Internet of Things) has revolutionized the world with its applications like home automation,
transportation, agriculture, etc. IoT-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks are an
emerging field that introduces the UAV network with the power of the Internet.IoT-based
UAV networks are a network of interconnected UAVs which are then equipped with sensors, a
microcontroller to exchange collected data with each other, and a GCS (Ground Control Station)
over the internet. IoT-based UAV network system is used for surveillance, monitoring, payload
delivery, and much more which generate a plethora of sensitive information which can be
obtained by adversaries in the middle. The communication between UAVs and GCS is vulnerable
to security threats using jamming and eavesdropping attacks. The message between UAV and
GCS is not enciphered which makes them error-prone. Attacks like GPS (Global Positioning
System) spoofing can be possible by sending fake coordinates to trick UAV’s control. Although
much effort has been made toward UAV security. However, there is a dearth of descriptive
reviews on secure communication in IoT-based UAV networks. The purpose of this paper is to
find and examine peer-reviewed literature that discusses previous six-year established papers
with existing attacks such as physical, and logical attacks with suggested solutions such as
trajectory planning, lightweight schemes, solutions based on blockchain, quantum cryptography,
etc. This paper analyzes the secure communication network between UAVs by systematically
answering research questions based on the research methodology for the relevant study. Finally,
the paper addresses several issues and guidelines for future research.
... Health Monitoring: In 2019, Islam et al. [231] proposed a BC-based scheme for secure monitoring using UAVs outside the homes in smart cities. The main components involved are the user (citizens), UAV (provides extended connectivity and low power transmission), and MEC (works as a validator in BC). ...
In recent times, IoT has emerged as a new paradigm for the interconnection of heterogeneous, resource-constrained, and communication-capable smart devices. It has been anticipated as a key enabler for various domains of applications such as health care, automotive, agriculture, industrial operations, automation , energy, and the next generation of living. However, the current IoT applications face significant challenges in terms of the huge amount of collected data, intensive data exchange, security, privacy, centralized processing, and interoperability. To mitigate many of these issues, blockchain has been identified as a promising innovative technology. Blockchain, in conjunction with smart contracts, has received significant attention both from the industry and academia and offers features such as irreversibility, non-repudiation, proof of provenance, fault tolerance, pseudonymity, decentralized operations and decision-making, and distributed ledger. The integration of blockchain with IoT requires essential insights concerning the application areas, scalability, security, privacy, data college and storage, performance, and governance. Thus, this paper intends to expound on the opportunities and key aspects of using blockchain in the IoT landscape. Specifically, this paper surveys the utilization of blockchain for various IoT applications. Besides, the paper distinguishes different technical aspects and presents the associated research challenges. At last, future research directions are discussed depending on the lessons learned.
... Ces derniers peuvent survoler les noeuds capteurs et envoient des messages de signalisation pour diffuser leur position géographique et ainsi les noeuds capteurs peuvent déduire leur position [111]. l'émergence de la technologie des drones leur a permis d'être utilisés pour effectuer diverses tâches dans le domaine des transports [87], de l'agriculture [76], de la santé [48] et de l'industrie [132]. En effet, les UAVs sont caractérisés par leur flexibilité, portabilité, leur coût réduit ainsi que leur praticité d'utilisation. ...
La collecte de données est l'une des fonctions les plus importantes des WSNs. Récemment, l'utilisation d'un nœud sink mobile a fait son apparition pour palier aux problèmes de la collecte classique de données. Bien que cette méthode ait beaucoup d'avantages, elle apporte aussi son lot de défis, dont la planification de la trajectoire du collecteur mobile. Il existe trois types de mobilité du sink : i) la mobilité aléatoire, ii) la mobilité prédéfinie: une approche statique où le sink suit un chemin calculé d'avance et iii) la mobilité non prédéfinie : une approche dynamique dans laquelle le sink découvre son chemin au cours du processus de collecte des données). Tout au long de notre travail, nous avons étudié différentes approches de planification de la trajectoire du drone. En premier lieu, nous avons proposé une solution statique. Elle vise à sélectionner le bon nombre de capteurs devant agir en tant que tête de cluster afin que le drone les utilise comme points de collecte. Cette méthode a pour but de minimiser la quantité d'énergie consommée à la fois par les capteurs et par le drone. Nous avons, par la suite, proposé une solution basée sur les champs potentiels artificiels pour diriger le drone au cours de son processus de collecte de données. Chaque n?ud est, dans ce cas, la source d'une force attractive proportionnelle à la quantité de données stockées dans son buffer. La troisième contribution, quant à elle, est une approche dynamique dans laquelle nous assignons à chaque n?ud capteur un poids qui correspond à sa priorité dans le processus de collecte de données. Il est calculé grâce à une fonction utilitaire basée sur la quantité de données stockée dans le buffer d'un n?ud et la fraîcheur de ces données.Les résultats d'évaluation ont montré que nos approches ont amélioré les performances du drone en terme de quantité de données récoltées et d'énergie consommée par rapport aux méthodes présentées dans la littérature
... In the paper [126], a scheme for monitoring outdoor health securely in a smart city is proposed that is based on blockchain and uses UAV (Unmanned Ariel Vehicle). The scheme proposed is concerned with accumulating health data from inbuilt sensors in wearable of users and transmitting this data to the MEC server which is nearby through UAV. ...
Deployment of secured healthcare information is a major challenge in a web-based environment. eHealth services are subjected to same security threats as other services. The purpose of blockchain is to provide a structure and security to the organization data. Healthcare data deals with confidential information. The medical records can be well organized and empower their propagation in a secured manner through the usage of blockchain technology. The study throws light on providing security of health services through blockchain technology. The authors have analyzed the various aspects of role of blockchain in healthcare through an extensive literature review. The application of blockchain in COVID-19 has also been analyzed and discussed in the study. Further application of blockchain in Indian healthcare has been highlighted in the paper. The study provides suggestions for strengthening the healthcare system by blending machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, and IoT with blockchain.
... Islam and Shin [124] proposed a secure outdoor health monitoring system based on blockchain technology and UAV consolidated with MEC. In the proposed system, Health Data (HD) are collected from sensors carried by the users, and this health data is forwarded to the next MEC server via a UAV. ...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have recently become one of the most important technological breakthroughs. They have opened the horizon for a vast array of applications and paved the way for a diversity of innovative solutions. Integrating drones with the Internet has led to the emergence of a new paradigm named the Internet of Drones (IoD). Several works dealt with the security of the IoD, and various surveys have been published on this topic over the past few years. The existing surveys either have limited scope or offer partial coverage of cybersecurity countermeasures. To address these gaps, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey related to the cyber and physical security of IoD. Differently from many surveys that only provide a classification of attacks/threats, we also propose three taxonomies that are related to (1) the assets of drones, (2) attacks, and (3) countermeasures. The first taxonomy is a two-level classification of the assets in the IoD. The first level considers the coarse-grained assets, which refer to the IoD's tangible elements, and the second level considers the fine-grained assets, which refer to the elements composing the coarse-grained assets. Based on the asset classification, we propose a taxonomy of attacks targeting the coarse and fine-grained assets, which allows a finer level of granularity to identify threats, and thus ensure better security. Also, we evaluate the risk of cyber and physical attacks by introducing a novel concept, named Chain of Impact, which connects four types of impacts, namely, Direct, Mission, Drone, and Environment. We propose a taxonomy of technical and non-technical countermeasures according to two implementation phases: Pre-incident, and Post-incident (or recovery). The pre-incident countermeasures are further classified as: preventive and detective. In addition, we present the countermeasures along with their performance and limitations. Finally, open research challenges are identified and ranked according to the level of attention they should receive from the research community. Also, future research directions and suggestions are presented for the security of the IoD.
... Authors in [13], [14] identify open research issues and challenges in UAV-assisted health-care intelligent systems and explain some of the practical attempts that have been made for employing UAVs in emergency medical services. References [15], [16] study the security issues in outdoor health monitoring systems with the help of UAVs. Authors in [17]- [19] aim to improve the procedure of collecting data from bio-sensors using UAVs. ...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a flexible and cost-effective solution for remote monitoring of the vital signs of patients in large-scale Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This paper deals with the problem of using UAVs for real-time scheduling of the transmission of vital signs in delay-sensitive IoMT WBANs. The main challenge for such a network is to timely and reliably transmit the vital signs of patients to the remote monitoring center without interrupting their daily lifestyles. To achieve this goal, we propose a
Q
-learning-based algorithm to optimize the trajectory of each UAV, as the mobile Base Station (BS), to harvest vital signs of patients in outdoor applications, especially in unreachable areas. In this algorithm, UAVs learn to reach the best 3D position by discovering the network environment step-by-step. It stands for the position in which the covered patients by each UAV have the highest transmission rate, the least delay and energy consumption. Moreover, we employ the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technique to simultaneously schedule multiple transmissions by accepting a degree of interference between them in order to enhance the spectrum efficiency of the network. Eventually, the performance of our proposed scheme is evaluated via extensive simulations in terms of throughput, energy consumption, and delay. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme iteratively converges to the benchmark value of the mentioned factors by increasing the information of cluster environment through episodes.
... In Smart Grid, the IBEC is mainly applied to aspects of pricing and framework designing of energy trading [30]- [33], and trading security ensuring [34]- [36]. The IBEC can also benefit the other IoT scenarios, such as, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [37]- [44], smart healthcare [45]- [52], edge intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) [53]- [57], supply chain [58], [59], smart city [60]- [62], etc. ...
As an important technology to ensure data security, consistency, traceability, etc., blockchain has been increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The integration of blockchain and edge computing (IBEC) can further improve the resource utilization in terms of network, computing, storage, and security. This paper aims to present a survey on the IBEC. In particular, we first give an overview of blockchain and edge computing respectively. We then present a general architecture of an IBEC system. We next study the various applications of the IBEC in IoT. We also discuss the optimizations of the IBEC system and solutions from perspectives of resource management and performance improvement. Finally, we analyze and summarize the existing challenges posed by the IBEC system and the potential solutions in the future.
... no security from cyber attacks. Islam et al. proposed a blockchain-based mechanism using bloom filter which provides protection from cyber threats in the healthcare system [125]. In this concern, Liu et al. proposed a blockchain-based distributed data storage scheme with enabled edge computing. ...
With the commencement of new technologies like IoT and the Cloud, the sources of data generation have increased exponentially. The use and processing of this generated data have motivated and given birth to many other domains. The concept of a smart city has also evolved from making use of this data in decision-making in the various aspects of daily life and also improvement in the traditional systems. In smart cities, various technologies work collaboratively; they include devices used for data collection, processing, storing, retrieval, analysis, and decision making. Big data storage, retrieval, and analysis play a vital role in smart city applications. Traditional data processing approaches face many challenges when dealing with such voluminous and high-speed generated data, such as semi-structured or unstructured data, data privacy, security, real-time responses, and so on. Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS) has been evolved as a potential solution for many applications in smart cities to complete this tedious task of handling big data with real-time response. PDS has been used in many smart city domains, including healthcare, transportation, the environment, energy, and industry. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of PDS and its applications in the domains of smart cities. The prominent domain of the smart city has been explored in detail; origin, current research status, challenges, and existing application of PDS along with research gaps and future directions. The foremost aim of this paper is to provide a detailed survey of PDS in smart cities; for readers and researchers who want to explore this field; along with the research opportunities in the domains.
... In Smart Grid, the IBEC is mainly applied to aspects of pricing and framework designing of energy trading [34][35][36][37], and trading security ensuring [38][39][40]. The IBEC can also benefit the other IoT scenarios, such as, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48], smart healthcare [49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56], edge intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) [57][58][59][60][61], supply chain [62,63], smart city [64][65][66], etc. ...
As an important technology to ensure data security, consistency, traceability, etc., blockchain has been increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The integration of blockchain and edge computing can further improve the resource utilization in terms of network, computing, storage, and security. This paper aims to present a survey on the integration of blockchain and edge computing. In particular, we first give an overview of blockchain and edge computing. We then present a general architecture of an integration of blockchain and edge computing system. We next study how to utilize blockchain to benefit edge computing, as well as how to use edge computing to benefit blockchain. We also discuss the issues brought by the integration of blockchain and edge computing system and solutions from perspectives of resource management, joint optimization, data management, computation offloading and security mechanism. Finally, we analyze and summarize the existing challenges posed by the integration of blockchain and edge computing system and the potential solutions in the future.
... This would fix many security vulnerabilities. Islam and Shin [37] revealed that the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) is an evolving technology that is not only common in the military but also civil applications. Another common technology, the internet of things (IoT), brings automation to everyday lives. ...
The Internet of Things (IoT), fast-growing smart equipment and high-speed networks, has become generally embraced and popular. Most IoT devices are nevertheless easy to hack and compromise. In general, the processors, storage, and network capacity of these IoT devices are limited. The security issues of this situation are exacerbated by several violations of safety policies. There have been suggestions and/or utilization of different security strategies and approaches. Blockchain mechanisms can be used as part of a security framework to protect many IoT-oriented applications as it ensures integrity and privacy even when datasets are released to the public. Hence, the paper elaborately surveyed common security issues in IoT architecture and the paper explores the key features of the blockchain. Along with the work proficiently investigates the technology behind bitcoin and how the blockchain solves many security issues in IoT applications. Thus the paper is concluded by providing the upsurges and limitations of various IoT with Blockchain technologies and their recent trends more precisely.
... Blockchain promises properties such as pseudonymity, security, immutability, and distributed [16]. Blockchain adopted asymmetric encryption in which the public is used as an identity and the private key is used to verify the data [17]. In blockchain, each block holds the hash of the previous block and forms a chain of blocks. ...
In the modern era, the internet of vehicles (IoV) is being utilized in commercial applications and extensively explored in research. However, internal fault in IoV can cause accidents on the road. Moreover, privacy concerns can hamper the internal data sharing to build a model to detect the anomaly. Federated learning (FL) and blockchain are emerging technologies that can assist in mitigating these challenges. FL-based anomaly detection is introduced to prevent road accidents with the help of blockchain. An environment is built to conduct experiments to prove the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The performance analysis demonstrates that our presented scheme outperforms the traditional scheme while having privacy concerns.
... More recently, drones have been widely used for data collection in WSNs as they offer a solution to the various drawbacks of ground mobile sinks. The emergence of drone technology has allowed them to be used to perform multiple tasks in several fields such as transport (Outay et al., 2020), agriculture (Maddikunta et al., 2020), health (Islam and Shin, 2019) and industry (Zhang et al., 2016). They are characterized by their flexibility, portability, reduced cost, and practicality of use. ...
... The Internet of Drones (IoDs) is a network in which a maintains controlled airspace of drones (which are known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to contribute to diverse application areas [5], such as battlefield [6], healthcare [7], smart factory, etc. IoD gains a lot of popularity due to its prominent functionalities (e.g., access to any location) [8]. Initially, IoD was introduced for military purposes, later, civilians accept it abruptly in various applications, such as package delivery, search and rescue, agriculture, and surveillance [9]. ...
The modern era is filled with smart entities (e.g., smart vehicles) that have both sense and actuate capabilities. These entities can collect lots of data during their functional period and these data can be utilized for the wellbeing of citizens. However, these data are very sensitive raising issues like privacy. Moreover, network scarcity, bandwidth consumption, etc. can worsen the circumstance. Federated learning (FL), internet of drones (IoD), and dew computing (DC) are revolutionary technologies that can be engaged to mitigate the aforementioned challenges. An FL-based computing paradigm is initiated over the dew computing to process road-related data to bring efficiency in the applications (e.g., finding parking locations) utilizing IoD. An experimental environment is established containing a traffic dataset as a proof of concept. The experimental results exhibit the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
... Authors of [109] suggested to blockchain as a solution for resolving security issues existing among UAV and MEC server. This is the first attempt when outdoor health monitoring system is proposed using blockchain. ...
... To mitigate the cyber threats and data integrity, the authors leverage UAS to collect the data derived from wearable devices on the users and upload it with MEC to the cloud. Thereafter, the cloud stores the collected data into Blockchain [19]. Another attempt, in [20], aims to provide an efficient Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) support for IIoT applications. ...
The prominent capacities of 5G New Radio (5G NR) cellular networking drive the rapid development of many fields. The ubiquitous implementations of 5G NR cellular networking also provide swarm Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) networking the feasibility of scalable deployment and smart control. However, the conveniences derived from 5G NR also bring other vulnerabilities to swarm UAS networking. The advanced capacities of 5G NR enable attackers to commit disruptive attacks to swarm UAS networking more severely and quickly. The requirement for the security of swarm UAS networking is imminent.
In this paper, we propose a lightweight Blockchain-based secure routing algorithm for swarm UAS networking. We leverage the lightweight Blockchain to enhance the security of routing of swarm UAS networking which is based on 5G NR cellular networking. Different from the conventional routing algorithms, the proposed algorithm with lightweight Blockchain can avoid the malicious connections from attackers, recognize the malicious UASs and mitigate the attacks from malicious UASs. Concurrently, the proposed algorithm are swarm UAS oriented which aims to extend the deployment of swarm UAS networking on a large scale. Compared with Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake(PoS), we adopt pheromone to estimate the traffic status of each UAS in swarm UAS networking, construct consensus for swarm UAS networking with Proof-of-Traffic (PoT) and synchronize the updated blocks for lightweight Blockchain passively under the constraints of energy consumption. The evaluation shows PoT can reduce the routing consumption in the processes of consensus construction and blocks synchronization. Compatible with the constrained resource of swarm UASs, the lightweight Blockchain-assisted approach, proposed in this paper, can maintain the efficiency of swarm UAS networking.
... Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks have drawn much attention in the last few years to perform complex and dangerous missions, such as search and rescue missions, coastal surveillance, traffic surveillance, and land surveying [1]. With the increased use of UAV networks, UAVs become target towards cyber-attacks [2,3]; thus, it is essential to maintain security for the communication between UAVs, especially for critical missions. ...
... Drones are highly mobile devices equipped with multiple sensors for different purposes that gather real-time visual/sensing information (not stick to a particular location) form their camera or other sensors interfaces. 70 As the drones are highly mobile, the traditional communication networks such as 3G/4G LTE/LTE-A are not suitable to manage its working/operations. It is due to high latency and low reliability of the traditional communication networks. ...
Nowadays, the exponential increase in the usage of drones in various realms of societal and military applications necessitates advancements and stability in drone communication. Drones have proven their potential in providing real-time cost-efficient solutions for several applications like healthcare, smart grid surveillance, smart city monitoring, and border surveillance. Though, it has many security and privacy issues, researchers across the globe have given numerous solutions to protect drone communication from cyber-attacks. Most of these solutions were based on cryptographic techniques and are highly compute extensive. There exist few blockchain-based solutions, which suffer from high transaction storage costs with communication reliability, latency, and bandwidth issues. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey to secure drone communication and propose a blockchain-based secure and intelligent drone communication architecture underlying 5G communication network and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. The proposed architecture uses an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as a platform for data storage, which ensures improved network performance, communication security & privacy, and reduces transaction storage cost. Further, it facilitates efficient drone communication in providing dynamic, flexible, and on-the-fly decisions com-petencies through 5G and AI technologies. Then, we incorporate a healthcare-based case study using the proposed architecture. At last, future research challenges and directions are emphasized for improvement in this research area.
... IoT is a network of sensors, actuator, and software (combinedly termed as things) in which things can communicate and exchange information among themselves [1]. Like other areas (e.g., medical [2], [3], education [4], industry [5]), IoT has started to contribute in military domain too and taken the term internet of military things (IoMT). IoMT can provide a lot of benefits to the military, like managing equipment, remote monitoring of soldiers, an enhanced view of the battlefield, etc. [6]. ...
Internet of Things (IoT) established the foundation of the smart world via its diverse functionalities (e.g., remote data acquisition, automated task execution). This trend continues to military applications too by introducing internet of military things (IoMT). Due to being at infancy level, new technologies require to move forward and assist IoMT to gain maturity. Mixed reality (MR) can be a potential technology which fuses the virtual and actual world. MR can improve the quality of service (QoS) in terms of inventory management, remote mission handling, battlefield assistance, etc. However, data among these applications is surrounded by cyber threats (e.g., illegal data modification, unauthorised data access). Blockchain is another promising technology which brings security in the distributed world. A content sharing scheme for MR application is proposed on the top of blockchain to bring security in the multi-user environment in IoMT. A smart contract is employed to manage security in accessing data by different users. Moreover, an experimental environment is set to observe the performance of the proposed scheme. The analysis manifests that proposed scheme maintains security without affecting the regular performance.
... In all of the aforementioned domains of healthcare, wearable electronic devices, which are known as the IoMT, are used for managing and transferring medical data and information [109], [110]. Increasing the use of mobile applications, consumer medical electronics, and wearables and AI has influenced the interoperability level in the healthcare domain. ...
Blockchain can be used to build a peer-to-peer, secure, and smart transaction system. As a horizontal technology that has changed several fields of industry, blockchain has tremendous potential to transform healthcare systems as well. In this article, a systematic review is conducted to critically evaluate 64 articles on blockchain-based healthcare systems, published between 2016 and January 2020 in 21 conferences, 33 journals, and ten online sources. The aim of this article is to answer three main questions. First, what are the applications of blockchain in the healthcare systems, and what are the structures and challenges of applying blockchain to a specific healthcare domain? Second, what are the technical, temporal, and spatial aspects of the currently developed blockchain applications for different healthcare domain? Third, what are the future research directions in designing and implementing blockchain-based healthcare systems? Statistical facts about the technical aspects of these 64 articles show that most of the proposed blockchain-based healthcare systems use private blockchain and Ethereum platforms; furthermore, the majority of the authors are affiliated with research institutions in the USA and China. We also discuss potential future research directions, e.g., integrating the blockchain in artificial intelligence based solutions, cloud-computing-based solutions, and parallel blockchain architecture.
... It can provide an extreme level of security to prevent third-party modification as well as different kinds of attacks. Many researchers are working to implement blockchain for storing the data securely both in academy and industry [9][10][11][12] . Blockchain can be a useful answer for different kinds of security threats [13] . ...
One of the biggest challenge in the world right now is to control the emission of carbon-dioxide (CO2) gas to reduce the greenhouse effect. Vehicles that are used in the transport sector are responsible to increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Restriction can be applied for private vehicle users to limit the usage of CO2 gas in the society. Internet of Things (IoT) devices specially different sensors can be used to collect the usage of CO2 gas from the vehicles of a particular user. Additionally, Mobile edge computing (MEC) server can be helpful to process the collected data. This paper briefly explains the impact of increasing CO2 gas in the environment and propose a secure scheme using recent technologies that can help to reduce the CO2 gas emission rate. Finally, blockchain technology is endorsed to build a secure system to protect it against the attacks (i.e., cyber threats and data integrity) and any kind of third-party interaction.
... Authors of [109] suggested to blockchain as a solution for resolving security issues existing among UAV and MEC server. This is the first attempt when outdoor health monitoring system is proposed using blockchain. ...
... Authors of [109] suggested to blockchain as a solution for resolving security issues existing among UAV and MEC server. This is the first attempt when outdoor health monitoring system is proposed using blockchain. ...
UAVs have found their applications in numerous applications from recreational activities to business in addition to military and strategic fields. However, research on UAVs is not going on as quickly as the technology. Especially, when it comes to the security of these devices, the academia is lagging behind the industry. This gap motivates our work in this paper as a stepping stone for future research in this area. A comprehensive survey on the security of UAVs and UAV-based systems can help the research community keep pace with, or even lead the industry. Although there are several reviews on UAVs or related areas, there is no recent survey broadly covering various aspects of security. Moreover, none of the existing surveys highlights current and future trends with a focus on the role of an omnipresent technology such as AI. This paper endeavors to overcome these shortcomings. We conduct a comprehensive review on security challenges of UAVs as well as the related security controls. Then we develop a future roadmap for research in this area with a focus on the role of AI. The future roadmap is established based on the identified current trends, under-researched topics, and a future look-ahead.
The portability and automation of the internet of drones (IOD) have drawn increasing attention in recent years, and it is being used in various fields (such as military, rescue and entertainment, and disaster management). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently established their capacity to provide cost-effective and credible solutions for various real-world scenarios. since security and privacy are among the main concerns for the IOD, in this chapter, the authors perform a complete analysis of security issues and solutions for IOD security, analyzing IOD-related security in disaster requirements and identifying the newest improvement in IOD security research. This analysis explores many essential security technologies emphasizing authentication mechanisms and blockchain-powered schemes. Based on a rigorous review, the authors discuss the issues faced by current approaches in disaster management and offer future IOD security research areas.
The advancement of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has led to the emergence of various health and emotion care services, e.g., health monitoring. To cater to increasing computational requirements of IoMT services, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as an indispensable technology in smart health. Benefiting from the cost-effectiveness of deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with MEC servers in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) have emerged as a promising solution for providing smart health services in proximity to medical devices (MDs). However, the escalating number of MDs and the limited availability of communication resources of UAVs give rise to a significant increase in transmission latency. Moreover, due to the limited communication range of UAVs, the geographically-distributed MDs lead to workload imbalance of UAVs, which deteriorates the service response delay. To this end, this paper proposes a UAV-enabled Distributed computation Offloading and Power control method with Multi-Agent, named DOPMA, for NOMA-based IoMT environment. Specifically, this paper introduces computation and transmission queue models to analyze the dynamic characteristics of task execution latency and energy consumption. Moreover, a credit assignment scheme-based reward function is designed considering both system-level rewards and rewards tailored to each MD, and an improved multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is developed to derive offloading and power control decisions independently. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing schemes, achieving reduction in energy consumption and decrease in average delay.
The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology into electronic health (eHealth) applications has revolutionized the healthcare landscape, enabling real‐time patient monitoring, personalized care, and improved patient outcomes. However, this convergence of IoT and healthcare also introduces critical security and privacy challenges, needing careful consideration. This survey comprehensively explores the multifaceted realm of security and privacy issues in IoT‐based eHealth applications. First, we taxonomize the diverse security threats that arise due to the interconnected nature of IoT medical devices. Additionally, we highlight privacy concerns stemming from the collection and sharing of personal health information, while reconciling them with the need for accessible and collaborative healthcare ecosystems. Second, we synthesize functional, ethical, and regulatory perspectives to pick up the major requirements needed in the context of eHealth data during their whole lifecycle, from creation to destruction. Third, we identify emerging research strategies employed to address security and privacy concerns, such as cloud‐based solutions, decentralized technologies such as blockchain technology and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), cryptographic approaches, fine‐grained access control strategies, and so forth. Additionally, we examine the impact of these approaches on computational efficiency, latency, and energy consumption, critically evaluating their suitability in the healthcare context. Building upon this comprehensive assessment, we outline potential future research directions aimed at advancing security and privacy measures in IoT‐based eHealth applications.
In order to incorporate patient data, the internet of healthcare things (IoHT) enables services using wearable healthcare devices. Blockchain 1.0 is based on bitcoin whereas the primary concept has relied on the cryptocurrency applications. Blockchain 2.0, which introduced the idea of the smart contract, was based on the defined single piece of code that is executed and saved in a decentralized ledger. Blockchain 3.0 significantly deals with the non-financial applications such as government, energy, health, etc. This generation of blockchain technology is spreading in the healthcare sector.
With the development of telecommunication technologies and the proliferation of network applications in the past decades, the traditional cloud network architecture becomes unable to accommodate such demands due to the heavy burden on the backhaul links and long latency. Therefore, edge computing, which brings network functions close to end-users by providing caching, computing and communication resources at network edges, turns into a promising paradigm. Benefit from its nature, edge computing enables emerging scenarios and use cases like Augmented Reality (AR) and Internet of Things (IowT). However, it also creates complexities to efficiently orchestrate heterogeneous services and manage distributed resources in the edge network. In this survey, we make a comprehensive review of the research efforts on service orchestration and resource management for edge computing. We first give an overview of edge computing, including architectures, advantages, enabling technologies and standardization. Next, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art techniques in the management and orchestration of edge computing is presented. Subsequently, the state-of-the-art research on the infrastructure of edge computing is discussed in various aspects. Finally, open research challenges and future directions are presented as well.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an intermediary can offer an efficient and useful communication paradigm for different Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Following the operational capabilities of IoTs, this emerging technology could be extremely helpful in the area, where human access is not possible. Because IoT devices are employed in an infrastructure-less environment, where they communicate with each other via the wireless medium to share accumulated data in network topological order. However, the unstructured deployment with wireless and dynamic communication make them disclosed to various security threats, which need to be addressed for their efficient results. Therefore, the primary objective of this work is to present a comprehensive survey of the theoretical literature associated with security concerns of this emerging technology from 2015-to-2022. To follow up this, we have overviewed different security threats of UAV-aided IoT applications followed by their countermeasures techniques to identify the current challenges and requirements of this emerging technology paradigm that must be addressed by researchers, enterprise market, and industry stakeholders. In light of underscored constrains, we have highlighted the open security challenges that could be assumed a move forward step toward setting the future research insights. By doing this, we set a preface for the answer to a question, why this paper is needed in the presence of published review articles. For novelty and uniqueness, we have performed a comparative analysis section-wise with rival papers to demonstrate that how this paper is different from them.
The perpetual evolution of IoT continues to make cities smart beyond measure with the abundance of data transactions through expansive networks. Healthcare has been a foremost pillar of settlements and has gained particular focus in recent times owing to the pandemic and the deficiencies it has brought to light. There is an exigency to developing smart healthcare systems that make smart cities more intelligent and sustainable. Therefore, this paper aims to present a study of smart healthcare in the context of a smart city, along with recent and relevant research areas and applications. Several applications have been discussed for early disease diagnosis and emergency services with advanced health technologies. It also focuses on security and privacy issues and the challenges posed by technologies such as wearable devices and big healthcare data. This paper briefly reviews some enhanced schemes and recently proposed security mechanisms as countermeasures to various cyber-attacks. Recent references are primarily used to present smart healthcare privacy and security issues. The issues are laid out briefly based on the different architecture layers, various security attacks, and their corresponding proposed solutions along with other facets of smart health such as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and healthcare data.
Robotics is the multi-disciplinary domain that is booming in today’s world, and expanding its roots deep into various fields of research, manufacturing industries, healthcare, and even in our day-to-day lives. Nevertheless, as with any other evolving technology, robotics face numerous challenges. In this context, lately, blockchain technology has been identified as a promising technology to resolve many of these issues such as identification of malicious/rogue nodes, malfunctioning/faults in automated processes, non-compliance to the agreed norms and privacy rules, security attacks on robotic systems, and non-transparency in performance monitoring and audits. In particular, blockchain with its features like decentrality, immutability, provenance, low operational cost, tight access control, and trustworthy operations, can offer significant improvements to new applications and use cases driven by robotics. Thus, the paper begins with exploring the key requirements and technical challenges encountered by robots in general. Next, it provides detailed overview of blockchain technology in a tutorial style. Then, the role of blockchain for different uses cases of robotics are surveyed. Furthermore, various technical challenges that need to be mitigated to harness full potential of blockchain for robotics are highlighted. Finally, the future research directions are presented that can pave the way ahead for advancements and profitable integration of blockchain in the realm of robotics.
In this paper, we investigate the task scheduling problem in the UAV-enable Mobile Edge-Computing (MEC) system with the objectives of minimizing the cost and the completion time. A NSGA-II algorithm is proposed for the problem under study. The solution is represented as a two-dimension location sequence. Major components of NSGA-II are delicately designed including the feasible solution generation method (FSGM) and genetic operations of crossover, mutation and selection. Three strategies are introduced in FSGM. A simulated annealing local search is integrated into the crossover operation, and meanwhile two novel mutation methods are proposed. The Pareto-based metrics are introduced to evaluate the performance of the compared algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposal is more effective and robust than the three existing algorithms.
During this last decade, the blockchain (BC) paradigm has been required in several use cases and scenarios in particular for security, privacy, and trust provisioning. Accordingly, several studies proposed the use of BC technology to secure and to assure the trustworthiness of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this context, this chapter highlights several applications and scenarios for the deployment of UAVs within diverse smart systems. In addition, it illustrates the advantages of the integration of the BC within UAVs-based smart systems. This integration reveals new challenges and future research directions that are discussed in this chapter.
This book discusses applications of blockchain in healthcare sector. The security of confidential and sensitive data is of utmost importance in healthcare industry. The introduction of blockchain methods in an effective manner will bring secure transactions in a peer-to-peer network. The book also covers gaps of the current available books/literature available for use cases of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in healthcare. The information and applications discussed in the book are immensely helpful for researchers, database professionals, and practitioners. The book also discusses protocols, standards, and government regulations which are very useful for policymakers.
Blockchain technology has received significant popularity, with a growing interest in various domains, including data processing, financial services, information security, and IoT to the healthcare and medical research industries. There has also been a tremendous trend in using blockchain technologies to provide efficient data protection in health care. However, through secure and efficient data storage, blockchain turns traditional healthcare approaches into a more robust means of effective treatment and cure. In this chapter, we examine both current and latest innovations in the healthcare sector through the application of blockchain as a platform. We propose a secure distributed application called Healthify, a wide-range healthcare data protection approach focused on distributed ledger technology where medical data is encoded to provide a safer environment. The objective of this approach is to provide a practical application that offers a permanent database and offers simple accessibility to the gadgets. The application’s basis is specified by the smart contract, which provides rules and regulations for the users. Also, the architecture of the distributed application promotes the delivery of secure healthcare services within the medical system.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is used to improve traditional healthcare systems in different aspects, including monitoring patients’ behaviors. Information gathered by sensors in the IoT plays an essential role in healthcare systems. Because of privacy and security issues, the data must be protected against unauthorized changes. On the other hand, Blockchain technology provides a wide range of mechanisms to protect data against changes. Therefore, IoT-based healthcare monitoring using Blockchain constitutes an exciting technological innovation, which may help mitigate security and privacy concerns related to the gathering of information during patient monitoring. In this chapter, the potential applications of IoT–Blockchain systems are studied, and then monitoring mechanisms in healthcare systems are analyzed. To this end, a novel architecture based on recently reported solutions is proposed. The proposed architecture, with the aid of computational power obtained from the IoT, Blockchain, and artificial intelligence, can be used in a wide range of solutions aimed at managing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In order to show the potential of the proposed architecture, three case studies are presented. At the end of this chapter, other applications of the proposed architecture are summarized, which can be used in pandemic situations.
The increasing number of heterogeneous devices connected to the Internet, together with tight 5G requirements have generated new challenges for designing network infrastructures. Industrial verticals such as automotive, smart city and eHealthcare (among others) need secure, low latency and reliable communications. To meet these stringent requirements, computing resources have to be moved closer to the user, from the core to the edge of the network. In this context, ETSI standardized Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). However, due to the cost of resources, MEC provisioning has to be carefully designed and evaluated. This survey firstly overviews standards, with particular emphasis on 5G and virtualization of network functions, then it addresses flexibility of MEC smart resource deployment and its migration capabilities. This survey explores how the MEC is used and how it will enable industrial verticals.
The “last mile” problem in logistics is challenging due to its low efficiency and high cost. To address this problem, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery such as drone delivery has been proposed and widely accepted as a promising solution. However, currently most of the existing UAV delivery systems are based on Cloud Computing which cannot efficiently meet the requirements of many real‐time services in UAV delivery systems. Meanwhile, the security issues in UAV delivery systems also raise critical concerns due to the existence of multiple participants (such as the sender, middler, and receiver) who may not maintain a mutual trust relationship among them. How to secure the UAV delivery process in such an untrusted environment is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and blockchain‐based UAV delivery system to resolve the “last mile” problem in logistics. Specifically, based on the MEC architecture, the blockchain nodes are deployed on the edge nodes to facilitate and secure the UAV delivery process. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed solution, a MEC‐based UAV delivery system prototype with a private blockchain on the Ethereum platform is implemented. Through the security analysis and performance evaluation, it is proven that our proposed solution can effectively solve the “last mile” problem and address the security issues in UAV delivery systems.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or Drones technology has a huge potential for supporting different efficient solutions for the smart applications in our world. The applications include smart things, smart transportation, smart cities, smart healthcare, smart personal care, smart house, smart industries, and so on. Due to the sensitive applications of UAVs, the security has become a major concern, and therefore, efficient techniques are required to protect captured data from hackers and the fictitious activities from illegitimate users. Machine learning (ML) techniques play a vital role in improving UAVs' security intelligently, while blockchain is recent technology for decentralized UAVs and security. Furthermore, watermarking guarantees digital media to be authenticated, protected, and copyright. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive survey of optimal techniques, which are used for securing UAVs applications in terms of blockchain, ML, and watermarking. Furthermore, we introduce each technique with the advantages and suitably used for securing UAVs collaboration applications. This survey contributes to a better understanding of the blockchain, ML, and watermarking techniques for securing UAVs and sheds new light on challenges and opportunities on subject applications.
There is a global hype in the development of digital healthcare infrastructure to cater the massive elderly population and infectious diseases. The digital facilitation is expected to ensure the patient privacy, scalability, and data integrity on the sensitive life critical healthcare data, while aligning to the global healthcare data protection standards. The patient data sharing to third parties such as research institutions and universities is also concerned as a significant contribution to the society to sharpen the research and investigations. The emergence of 5G communication technologies eradicates the borders between patients, hospital and other institutions with high end service standards. In patients' perspective, healthcare service delivery through the digital medium is beneficial in terms of time, costs, and risks. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-access Edge Computing(MEC) and blockchain based service architecture utilizing the lightweight ECQV (Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone) certificates for the realtime data privacy, integrity, and authentication between IoT, MEC, and cloud. We further attached storage offloading capability to the blockchain to ensure scalability with a massive number of connected medical devices to the cloud. We introduced a rewarding scheme to the patients and hospitals through the blockchain to encourage data sharing. The access control is handled through the smart contracts. We evaluated the proposed system in a near realistic implementation using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform with Raspberry Pi devices to simulate the activity of the medical sensors.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has and continues to have far-reaching global economic and environmental implications. In developing economies and regions, the pandemic's disruption of the agriculture commodity supply chain has made it difficult for smallholder farmers to exist. Smallholder farmer's traditional struggles have worsened. However, technology may provide promise of improving conditions for vulnerable farmers even in a period of crises such as the COVID-19 period. In this article, we draw on lessons learned in developed and developing countries to propose critical digital transformation for building a resilient and sustainable post COVID- 19 supply chains for developing countries; especially for smallholder farmers operating in global value chains. We discuss how digital technologies and specifically digital inclusion of smallholder farmers can prevent major disruptions from damaging the livelihoods of society's most vulnerable. We discuss feasibility and provide some caveats for a post COVID-19 digital inclusion in developing countries.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to transform human life and unleash enormous economic benefit. However, inadequate data security and trust of current IoT are seriously limiting its adoption. Blockchain, a distributed and tamper-resistant ledger, maintains consistent records of data at different locations, and has the potential to address the data security concern in IoT networks. While providing data security to the IoT, Blockchain also encounters a number of critical challenges inherent in the IoT, such as a huge number of IoT devices, non-homogeneous network structure, limited computing power, low communication bandwidth, and error-prone radio links. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on existing Blockchain technologies with an emphasis on the IoT applications. The Blockchain technologies which can potentially address the critical challenges arising from the IoT and hence suit the IoT applications are identified with potential adaptations and enhancements elaborated on the Blockchain consensus protocols and data structures. Future research directions are collated for effective integration of Blockchain into the IoT networks.
In this paper we proposed a UAV-based wireless network for bridging communication between nodes on the ground. The proposed method provides on the fly communication facilities in order to connect two machines through a wireless access point mounted on a UAV through IEEE 802.11n. We conducted our experiments in an outdoor environment to investigate the performance of 802.11n at both 2.4 and 5 GHz band. Our evaluations showed that 802.11n at 5 GHz performs slightly better than 802.11n at 2.4 GHz with respect to data rate. We also concluded that 802.11n at both 2.4 and 5 GHz are practicable in rescue operations and disaster management scenarios.
Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic diseases. We propose that this requires a transition from the clinic-centric treatment to patient-centric healthcare where each agent such as hospital, patient, and services are seamlessly connected to each other. This patient-centric IoT eHealth ecosystem needs a multi-layer architecture: (1) device, (2) fog computing and (3) cloud to empower handling of complex data in terms of its variety, speed, and latency. This fog-driven IoT architecture is followed by various case examples of services and applications that are implemented on those layers. Those examples range from mobile health, assisted living, e-medicine, implants, early warning systems, to population monitoring in smart cities. We then finally address the challenges of IoT eHealth such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, device-network-human interfaces, security, and privacy.
The emergence of several new computing applications, such as virtual reality and smart environments, has become possible due to availability of large pool of cloud resources and services. However, the delay-sensitive applications pose strict delay requirements that transforms euphoria into a problem. The cloud computing paradigm is unable to meet the requirements of low latency, location awareness, and mobility support. In this context, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) was introduced to bring the cloud services and resources closer to the user proximity by leveraging the available resources in the edge networks. In this paper, we present the definitions of the MEC given by researchers. Further, motivation of the MEC is highlighted by discussing various applications. We also discuss the opportunities brought by the MEC and some of the important research challenges are highlighted in MEC environment. A brief overview of accepted papers in our Special Issue on MEC is presented. Finally we conclude this paper by highlighting the key points and summarizing the paper.
The current paper presents an outdoor monitoring system for elderly people, which can transmit information on physiological signals and falling events to a healthcare center at any time and from any place. To detect simultaneously the occurrence of any falling event, as well as the relative electrocardiogram (ECG) signal of the user, a multi-thread method is proposed with the objective of enhancing the response time and the accuracy of detection. A healthcare box is used to determine the relative position of the patient through a global positioning system for fall detection; moreover, an ECG signal acquisition thread is adopted to increase the precision of the fall detection system. Integrating a precise map into the monitoring system facilitates understanding of a client user of the correct location and surrounding environment using the portable display. According to experimental results based on 4,000 samples, successful detection time with the multi-thread method was reduced by 38%, thereby increasing rescue opportunities for elderly patients who are at risk1.
Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around blockchains, we examine whether they make a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts-scripts that reside on the blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing, time-consuming workflows. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically as compared to single UAV systems. However, there are many issues to be resolved before effective use of UAVs can be made to provide stable and reliable context-specific networks. Much of the work carried out in the areas of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), and Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) does not address the unique characteristics of the UAV networks. UAV networks may vary from slow dynamic to dynamic; have intermittent links and fluid topology. While it is believed that ad hoc mesh network would be most suitable for UAV networks yet the architecture of multi-UAV networks has been an understudied area. Software Defined Networking (SDN) could facilitate flexible deployment and management of new services and help reduce cost, increase security and availability in networks. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETS and VANETS. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints and changing link quality. UAVs may fail and the network may get partitioned making delay and disruption tolerance an important design consideration. Limited life of the node and dynamicity of the network leads to the requirement of seamless handovers where researchers are looking at the work done in the areas of MANETs and VANETs, but the jury is still out. As energy supply on UAVs is limited, protocols in various layers should contribute towards greening of the network. This article surveys the work done towards all of these outstanding issues, relating to this new class of networks, so as to spur further research in these areas.
To stay up to date with world issues and cutting-edge technologies, the newspaper plays a crucial role. However, collecting news is not a very easy task. Currently, news publishers are collecting news from their correspondents through social networks, email, phone call, fax, etc. and sometimes they buy news from the agencies. However, the existing news sharing networks may not provide security for data integrity and any third party may obstruct the regular flow of news sharing. Moreover, the existing news schemes are very vulnerable in case of disclosing the identity. Therefore, a universal platform is needed in the era of globalization where anyone can share and trade news from anywhere in the world securely, without the interference of third-party, and without disclosing the identity of an individual. Recently, blockchain has gained popularity because of its security mechanism over data, identity, etc. Blockchain enables a distributed way of managing transactions where each participant of the network holds the same copy of the transactions. Therefore, with the help of pseudonymity, fault-tolerance, immutability, and the distributed structure of blockchain, a scheme (termed as NEWSTRADCOIN) is presented in this paper in which not only news can be shared securely but also anyone can earn money by selling news. The proposed NEWSTRADCOIN can provide a universal platform where publishers can directly collect news from news-gatherers in a secure way by maintaining data integrity, without experiencing the interference of a third-party, and without disclosing the identity of the news gatherer and publishers.
Blockchain has a range of built-in features, such as distributed ledger, decentralized storage, authentication, security, and immutability, and has moved beyond hype to practical applications in industry sectors such as Healthcare. Blockchain applications in the healthcare sector generally require more stringent authentication, interoperability, and record sharing requirements, due to exacting legal requirements, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Building on existing blockchain technologies, researchers in both academia and industry have started to explore applications that are geared toward healthcare use. These applications include smart contracts, fraud detection, and identity verification. Even with these improvements, there are still concerns as blockchain technology has its own specific vulnerabilities and issues that need to be addressed, such as mining incentives, mining attacks, and key management. Additionally, many of the healthcare applications have unique requirements that are not addressed by many of the blockchain experiments being explored, as highlighted in this survey paper. A number of potential research opportunities are also discussed in this paper.
In order to stay up to date with world issues and cutting-edge technologies, the newspaper plays a crucial role. However, collecting news is not a very easy task. Currently, news publishers are collecting news from their correspondents through social networks, email, phone call, fax etc. and sometimes they buy news from the agencies. However, the existing news sharing networks may not provide security for data integrity and any third party may obstruct the regular flow of news sharing. Moreover, the existing news schemes are very vulnerable in case of disclosing the identity. Therefore, a universal platform is needed in the era of globalization where anyone can share and trade news from anywhere in the world securely, without the interference of third-party, and without disclosing the identity of an individual. Recently, blockchain has gained popularity because of its security mechanism over data, identity, etc. Blockchain enables a distributed way of managing transactions where each participant of the network holds the same copy of the transactions. Therefore, with the help of pseudonymity, fault-tolerance, immutability and the distributed structure of blockchain, a scheme (termed as NEWSTRADCOIN) is presented in this paper in which not only news can be shared securely but also anyone can earn money by selling news. The proposed NEWSTRADCOIN can provide a universal platform where publishers can directly obtain news from news-gatherers in a secure way by maintaining data integrity, without experiencing the interference of a third-party, and without disclosing the identity of the news gatherer and publishers.
The blockchain has had to grow up rather quickly as financial firms, consultants, healthcare providers, and others have all sought ways to implement the technology into their stack. However, for many, the blockchain is still a nebulous concept. And even if they understand the "what", understanding why it should be used and what problems it can solve remains unclear.This chapter answers these questions and more. What is a blockchain? How does it work? How does a blockchain handle trust in a distributed fashion? And when should a blockchain actually be used for a project?Ultimately, there are nine factors that comprise a blockchain that include: shifting trust from a middleman to the system; cryptography & public-key infrastructure; an immutable nature so the ledger can be completely trusted; and decentralization, so even if one node goes down, the data remains secure.Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize many industries and use cases, and we've only touched on the tip of this iceberg. The information in this chapter will provide the necessary introduction to guide you on your path to using the blockchain.
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with successive interference cancellation receiver is considered as one of the most potent multiple access techniques to be adopted in future wireless communication networks. Data security in the NOMA transmission scheme is on much attention drawing issue. Blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer network enables a way of protecting information from unauthorized access, tempering etc. By utilizing encryption techniques of blockchain, a secured data communication scheme using blockchain in NOMA is proposed in this paper. A two-phase encryption technique with key generation using different parameter is proposed. In the first-phase data is encrypted by imposing users’ public key and in the second phase, a private key of the base station (BS) is engaged for encryption. Finally, the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing scheme is proven through a comparative study based on the different features.
Management and mission planning over a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remains to date as a challenging research trend in what regards to this particular type of aircrafts. These vehicles are controlled by a number of ground control station (GCS), from which they are commanded to cooperatively perform different tasks in specific geographic areas of interest. Mathematically the problem of coordinating and assigning tasks to a swarm of UAV can be modeled as a constraint satisfaction problem, whose complexity and multiple conflicting criteria has hitherto motivated the adoption of multi-objective solvers such as multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). The encoding approach consists of different alleles representing the decision variables, whereas the fitness function checks that all constraints are fulfilled, minimizing the optimization criteria of the problem. In problems of high complexity involving several tasks, UAV and GCS, where the space of search is huge compared to the space of valid solutions, the convergence rate of the algorithm increases significantly. To overcome this issue, this work proposes a weighted random generator for the creation and mutation of new individuals. The main objective of this work is to reduce the convergence rate of the MOEA solver for multi-UAV mission planning using weighted random strategies that focus the search on potentially better regions of the solution space. Extensive experimental results over a diverse range of scenarios evince the benefits of the proposed approach, which notably improves this convergence rate with respect to a naïve MOEA approach.
Blockchain is a new technology, based on hashing, which is at the foundation of the platforms for trading cryptocurrencies and executing smart contracts. This article reviews the basic ideas of this technology and provides a sample minimalist implementation in Python.
Healthcare applications in IoT systems have been receiving increasing attention because they help facilitate remote monitoring of patients. In this paper, we propose a reliable oneM2M-based IoT system for Personal Healthcare Devices. In order to use a Personal Healthcare Device as an Application Dedicated Node in the proposed system, a protocol conversion between ISO/IEEE 11073 protocol messages and oneM2M protocol messages is performed in gateways located between Personal Healthcare Devices and the PHD management server. The proposed oneM2M-based IoT system for Personal Healthcare Device is constructed, and evaluated in various experiments. The experiments show that the protocol conversion performs effectively, and that the conversion process does not cause the system to suffer serious performance degradation, even when the number of Application Dedicated Node is quite large.
Some Personal Healthcare Device data is too precious to lose due to system failures under u-healthcare environments. However, until now, few studies have focused on fault-tolerant health data services. Therefore, we also propose a fault-tolerant algorithm for the reliable IoT system in which gateways on the same layer in the system are linked to form a daisy chain for fault tolerance at the level, and a gateway stores the backup copy of the previous gateway positioned immediately ahead of the gateway in the daisy chain. The upper-layered gateway stores the parity data of the daisy chain as well. In this manner, as many as two gateway faults occurred at the same time can be recovered. For experiments, the resource trees of the oneM2M-based IoT system were expanded to store information on daisy chains, backup copies, and parity. Our experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm can recover from faults on gateways in the oneM2M-based IoT system.
Many advancements have been taking place in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology lately. This is leading towards the design and development of UAVs with various sizes that possess increased on-board processing, memory, storage, and communication capabilities. Consequently, UAVs are increasingly being used in a vast amount of commercial, military, civilian, agricultural, and environmental applications. However, to take full advantages of their services, these UAVs must be able to communicate efficiently with each other using UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communication and with existing networking infrastructures using UAV-to-Infrastructure (U2I) communication. In this paper, we identify the functions, services and requirements of UAV-based communication systems. We also present networking architectures, underlying frameworks, and data traffic requirements in these systems as well as outline the various protocols and technologies that can be used at different UAV communication links and networking layers. In addition, the paper discusses middleware layer services that can be provided in order to provide seamless communication and support heterogeneous network interfaces. Furthermore, we discuss a new important area of research, which involves the use of UAVs in collecting data from wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We discuss and evaluate several approaches that can be used to collect data from different types of WSNs including topologies such as linear sensor networks (LSNs), geometric and clustered WSNs. We outline the benefits of using UAVs for this function, which include significantly decreasing sensor node energy consumption, lower interference, and offers considerably increased flexibility in controlling the density of the deployed nodes since the need for the multihop approach for sensor-to-sink communication is either eliminated or significantly reduced. Consequently, UAVs can provide good connectivity to WSN clusters.
For various reasons, the cloud computing paradigm is unable to meet certain requirements (e.g. low latency and jitter, context awareness, mobility support) that are crucial for several applications (e.g. vehicular networks, augmented reality). To fulfil these requirements, various paradigms, such as mobile edge computing, fog computing, and mobile cloud computing, have emerged in recent years. While these edge paradigms share several features, most of the existing research is compartmentalised; no synergies have been explored. This is especially true in the field of security, where most analyses focus only on one edge paradigm, while ignoring the others. The main goal of this study is to holistically analyse the security threats, challenges, and mechanisms inherent in all edge paradigms, while highlighting potential synergies and venues of collaboration. In our results, we will show that all edge paradigms should consider the advances in other paradigms.
Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.