Finding reliable and efficient routes is a persistent problem in megacities. To address this problem, several algorithms have been proposed. However, there are still areas of research that require ...attention. Many traffic-related problems can be resolved with the help of smart cities that incorporate the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). On the other hand, due to rapid increases in the population and automobiles, traffic congestion has become a serious concern. This paper presents a heterogeneous algorithm called ant-colony optimization with pheromone termite (ACO-PT), which combines two state-of-the-art algorithms, pheromone termite (PT) and ant-colony optimization (ACO), to address efficient routing to improve energy efficiency, increase throughput, and shorten end-to-end latency. The ACO-PT algorithm seeks to provide an effective shortest path from a source to a destination for drivers in urban areas. Vehicle congestion is a severe issue in urban areas. To address this issue, a congestion-avoidance module is added to handle potential overcrowding. Automatic vehicle detection has also been a challenging issue in vehicle management. To address this issue, an automatic-vehicle-detection (AVD) module is employed with ACO-PT. The effectiveness of the proposed ACO-PT algorithm is demonstrated experimentally using network simulator-3 (NS-3) and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO). Our proposed algorithm is compared with three cutting-edge algorithms. The results demonstrate that the proposed ACO-PT algorithm is superior to earlier algorithms in terms of energy usage, end-to-end delay, and throughput.
Remote sensing technologies have been widely used in the contexts of land cover and land use. The image classification algorithms used in remote sensing are of paramount importance since the ...reliability of the result from remote sensing depends heavily on the classification accuracy. Parametric classifiers based on traditional statistics have successfully been used in remote sensing classification, but the accuracy is greatly impacted and rather constrained by the statistical distribution of the sensing data. To eliminate those constraints, new variants of support vector machine (SVM) are introduced. In this paper, we propose and implement land use classification based on improved SVM-enabled radial basis function (RBF) and SVM-Linear for image sensing. The proposed variants are applied for the cross-validation to determine how the optimization of parameters can affect the accuracy. The accuracy assessment includes both training and test sets, addressing the problems of overfitting and underfitting. Furthermore, it is not trivial to determine the generalization problem merely based on a training dataset. Thus, the improved SVM-RBF and SVM-Linear also demonstrate the outstanding generalization performance. The proposed SVM-RBF and SVM-Linear variants have been compared with the traditional algorithms (Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) and Minimum Distance Classifier (MDC)), which are highly compatible with remote sensing images. Furthermore, the MLC and MDC are mathematically modeled and characterized with new features. Also, we compared the proposed improved SVM-RBF and SVM-Linear with the current state-of-the-art algorithms. Based on the results, it is confirmed that proposed variants have higher overall accuracy, reliability, and fault-tolerance than traditional as well as latest state-of-the-art algorithms.
Purpose
This research aims to explore how racist language in service interactions in the health and education sectors affects service consumers belonging to the Sheedi community in Pakistan’s Sindh ...province. This research questions the use of racist language and proposes the use of inclusive language in service sectors to reduce the discrimination the Sheedi community faces because of such racist language.
Design/methodology/approach
This empirical study takes place in the health and education sectors in Sindh province. Using a qualitative and narrative approach, this study categorizes Sheedi service consumers’ personal experiences to gain deep and holistic insights into the racist language used in service interactions and proposes the use of inclusive language.
Findings
Findings demonstrate how some non-Sheedis used racist language against the Sheedi service consumers in the health and education sectors, and how such racist language was influenced by class consciousness and gender bias. Inclusive language, which emphasizes professional lexicon, culturally appropriate terminology, gender-neutral vocabulary and other socially acceptable terms, was proposed to be used in the service interactions with Sheedi service consumers.
Originality/value
This study makes a conceptual contribution to existing literature on the use of language in service interactions and documents how the Sheedi community is treated in Pakistan’s Sindh province. This research can help researchers expand research in contexts where the use of racist language hinders progress, while the use of inclusive language can lead to sustainable development of service sectors.
This paper introduces the design, implementation, and performance analysis of the scalable and mobility-aware hybrid protocol named boarder node medium access control (BN-MAC) for wireless sensor ...networks (WSNs), which leverages the characteristics of scheduled and contention-based MAC protocols. Like contention-based MAC protocols, BN-MAC achieves high channel utilization, network adaptability under heavy traffic and mobility, and low latency and overhead. Like schedule-based MAC protocols, BN-MAC reduces idle listening time, emissions, and collision handling at low cost at one-hop neighbor nodes and achieves high channel utilization under heavy network loads. BN-MAC is particularly designed for region-wise WSNs. Each region is controlled by a boarder node (BN), which is of paramount importance. The BN coordinates with the remaining nodes within and beyond the region. Unlike other hybrid MAC protocols, BN-MAC incorporates three promising models that further reduce the energy consumption, idle listening time, overhearing, and congestion to improve the throughput and reduce the latency. One of the models used with BN-MAC is automatic active and sleep (AAS), which reduces the ideal listening time. When nodes finish their monitoring process, AAS lets them automatically go into the sleep state to avoid the idle listening state. Another model used in BN-MAC is the intelligent decision-making (IDM) model, which helps the nodes sense the nature of the environment. Based on the nature of the environment, the nodes decide whether to use the active or passive mode. This decision power of the nodes further reduces energy consumption because the nodes turn off the radio of the transceiver in the passive mode. The third model is the least-distance smart neighboring search (LDSNS), which determines the shortest efficient path to the one-hop neighbor and also provides cross-layering support to handle the mobility of the nodes. The BN-MAC also incorporates a semi-synchronous feature with a low duty cycle, which is advantageous for reducing the latency and energy consumption for several WSN application areas to improve the throughput. BN-MAC uses a unique window slot size to enhance the contention resolution issue for improved throughput. BN-MAC also prefers to communicate within a one-hop destination using Anycast, which maintains load balancing to maintain network reliability. BN-MAC is introduced with the goal of supporting four major application areas: monitoring and behavioral areas, controlling natural disasters, human-centric applications, and tracking mobility and static home automation devices from remote places. These application areas require a congestion-free mobility-supported MAC protocol to guarantee reliable data delivery. BN-MAC was evaluated using network simulator-2 (ns2) and compared with other hybrid MAC protocols, such as Zebra medium access control (Z-MAC), advertisement-based MAC (A-MAC), Speck-MAC, adaptive duty cycle SMAC (ADC-SMAC), and low-power real-time medium access control (LPR-MAC). The simulation results indicate that BN-MAC is a robust and energy-efficient protocol that outperforms other hybrid MAC protocols in the context of quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as energy consumption, latency, throughput, channel access time, successful delivery rate, coverage efficiency, and average duty cycle.
Low-speed internet can negatively impact incident response by causing delayed detection, ineffective response, poor collaboration, inaccurate analysis, and increased risk. Slow internet speeds can ...delay the receipt and analysis of data, making it difficult for security teams to access the relevant information and take action, leading to a fragmented and inadequate response. All of these factors can increase the risk of data breaches and other security incidents and their impact on IoT-enabled communication. This study combines virtual network function (VNF) technology with software -defined networking (SDN) called virtual network function software-defined networking (VNFSDN). The adoption of the VNFSDN approach has the potential to enhance network security and efficiency while reducing the risk of cyberattacks. This approach supports IoT devices that can analyze large volumes of data in real time. The proposed VNFSDN can dynamically adapt to changing security requirements and network conditions for IoT devices. VNFSDN uses threat filtration and threat-capturing and decision-driven algorithms to minimize cyber risks for IoT devices and enhance network performance. Additionally, the integrity of IoT devices is safeguarded by addressing the three risk categories of data manipulation, insertion, and deletion. Furthermore, the prioritized delegated proof of stake (PDPoS) consensus variant is integrated with VNFSDN to combat attacks. This variant addresses the scalability issue of blockchain technology by providing a safe and adaptable environment for IoT devices that can quickly be scaled up and down to pull together the changing demands of the organization, allowing IoT devices to efficiently utilize resources. The PDPoS variant provides flexibility to IoT devices to proactively respond to potential security threats, preventing or mitigating the impact of cyberattacks. The proposed VNFSDN dynamically adapts to the changing security requirements and network conditions, improving network resiliency and enabling proactive threat detection. Finally, we compare the proposed VNFSDN to existing state-of-the-art approaches. According to the results, the proposed VNFSDN has a 0.08 ms minimum response time, a 2% packet loss rate, 99.5% network availability, a 99.36% threat detection rate, and a 99.77% detection accuracy with 1% malicious nodes.
Deep learning algorithms have a wide range of applications, including cancer diagnosis, face and speech recognition, object recognition, etc. It is critical to protect these models since any changes ...to them can result in serious losses in a variety of ways. This article proposes the consortium blockchain-enabled conventional neural network (CBCNN), a four-layered paradigm for detecting malicious vehicles. Layer-1 is a convolutional neural network-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) model for the vehicle; Layer-2 is a spatial pyramid polling layer for the vehicle; Layer-3 is a fully connected layer for the vehicle; and Layer-4 is a consortium blockchain for the vehicle. The first three layers accurately identify the vehicles, while the final layer prevents any malicious attempts. The primary goal of the four-layered paradigm is to successfully identify malicious vehicles and mitigate the potential risks they pose using multi-label classification. Furthermore, the proposed CBCNN approach is employed to ensure tamper-proof protection against a parameter manipulation attack. The consortium blockchain employs a proof-of-luck mechanism, allowing vehicles to save energy while delivering accurate information about the vehicle's nature to the "vehicle management system." C++ coding is employed to implement the approach, and the ns-3.34 platform is used for simulation. The ns3-ai module is specifically utilized to detect anomalies in the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs). Finally, a comparative analysis is conducted between the proposed CBCNN approach and state-of-the-art methods. The results confirm that the proposed CBCNN approach outperforms competing methods in terms of malicious label detection, average accuracy, loss ratio, and cost reduction.
Robust paradigms are a necessity, particularly for emerging wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. The lack of robust and efficient paradigms causes a reduction in the provision of quality of ...service (QoS) and additional energy consumption. In this paper, we introduce modular energy-efficient and robust paradigms that involve two archetypes: (1) the operational medium access control (O-MAC) hybrid protocol and (2) the pheromone termite (PT) model. The O-MAC protocol controls overhearing and congestion and increases the throughput, reduces the latency and extends the network lifetime. O-MAC uses an optimized data frame format that reduces the channel access time and provides faster data delivery over the medium. Furthermore, O-MAC uses a novel randomization function that avoids channel collisions. The PT model provides robust routing for single and multiple links and includes two new significant features: (1) determining the packet generation rate to avoid congestion and (2) pheromone sensitivity to determine the link capacity prior to sending the packets on each link. The state-of-the-art research in this work is based on improving both the QoS and energy efficiency. To determine the strength of O-MAC with the PT model; we have generated and simulated a disaster recovery scenario using a network simulator (ns-3.10) that monitors the activities of disaster recovery staff; hospital staff and disaster victims brought into the hospital. Moreover; the proposed paradigm can be used for general purpose applications. Finally; the QoS metrics of the O-MAC and PT paradigms are evaluated and compared with other known hybrid protocols involving the MAC and routing features. The simulation results indicate that O-MAC with PT produced better outcomes.
Cloud computing is a model for on-demand delivery of IT resources (e.g., servers, storage, databases, etc.) over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Although it provides numerous benefits to ...cloud service users (CSUs) such as flexibility, elasticity, scalability, and economies of scale, there is a large trust deficit between CSUs and cloud service providers (CSPs) that prevents the widespread adoption of this computing paradigm. While some businesses have slowly started adopting cloud computing with careful considerations, others are still reluctant to migrate toward it due to several data security and privacy issues. Therefore, the creation of a trust model that can evolve to reflect the true assessment of CSPs in terms of either a positive or a negative reputation as well as quantify trust level is of utmost importance to establish trust between CSUs and CSPs. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy-logic based approach that allows the CSUs to determine the most trustworthy CSPs. Specifically, we develop inference rules that will be applied in the fuzzy inference system (FIS) to provide a quantitative security index to the CSUs. One of the main advantages of the FIS is that it considers the uncertainties and ambiguities associated with measuring trust. Moreover, our proposed fuzzy-logic based trust model is not limited to the CSUs as it can be used by the CSPs to promote their services through self-evaluation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed fuzzy-based trust model, we present case studies where several CSPs are evaluated and ranked based on the security index.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a popular process automation technology that leverages software to play the function of humans when employing graphical user interfaces. RPA’s scope is limited, ...and various requirements must be met for it to be applied efficiently. Business process management (BPM), on the other hand, is a well-established area of research that may provide favorable conditions for RPA to thrive. We provide an efficient technique for merging RPA with BPM (RPABPM) to synchronize the technology for efficient automated business processes. The problem formulation process is carried out to cut management-related expenditures. The proposed RPABPM strategy includes the five stages (design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization) for optimal business automation and energy savings. Effective business process management is proved by employing an end-to-end process. Furthermore, findings have been obtained employing three empirical investigations that are performed to assess the practicality and precision of the proposed RPABPM approach. The first objective of the initial study is to confirm the practicality and precision of the approach employed to evaluate the acceptance, possibility, significance, and integration of RPA with BPM. The second study attempts to verify the method’s high-quality characteristics. The third study attempts to assess the approach’s effectiveness in analyzing and identifying BPM that are best suited for RPA. The proposed RPABPM is validated on the industrial robot manufactured by ABB with six-axis IRB140 and supported with a Windows CE-based Flex Pendant (teach pendant). An IRC5 controller is used to run RobotWare 5.13.10371. A pre-installed .NET Compact Framework 3.5 is used. Finally, the proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art methods from an efficiency and power consumption perspective.