Future Internet, Volume 11, Issue 11 (November 2019) – 25 articles

Pedestrian attribute recognition is to predict a set of attribute labels of the pedestrian from surveillance scenarios, which is a very challenging task for computer vision due to poor image quality, continual appearance variations, as well as diverse spatial distribution of imbalanced attributes. It is desirable to model the label dependencies between different attributes to improve the recognition performance as each pedestrian normally possesses many attributes. In this paper, we treat pedestrian attribute recognition as multi-label classification and propose a novel model based on the graph convolutional network (GCN). The model is mainly divided into two parts, we first use convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract pedestrian feature, which is a normal operation processing image in deep learning, then we transfer attribute labels to word embedding and construct a correlation matrix between labels to help GCN propagate information between nodes. This paper applies the object classifiers learned by GCN to the image representation extracted by CNN to enable the model to have the ability to be end-to-end trainable. Experiments on pedestrian attribute recognition dataset show that the approach obviously outperforms other existing state-of-the-art methods. Full article

In order to ease the conflict between the bandwidth demand of high-rate wireless communication and the shortage of spectrum resources, a wideband spectrum sensing method based on reconfigurable filter bank (RFB) with adjustable resolution is presented. The wideband signals are uniformly divided into multi-narrowband signals by RFB, which is designed by polyphase uniform Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) modulation, and each sub-band is sensed by energy detection. According to the idle proportion of detected sub-bands, the number of RFB sub-bands is reset in next spectrum-sensing time. By simulating with collected wideband dataset, the influence of filter bank sub-bands number and idle state proportion on the sensing results is analyzed, and then on the basis of the trade-off between spectrum-sensing resolution and computational complexity, the optimal sub-bands number of filter bank is selected, so as to improve the detection performance and save resources. Full article

The prediction of roll motion in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is vital for marine safety and the efficiency of USV operations. However, the USV roll motion at sea is a complex time-varying nonlinear and non-stationary dynamic system, which varies with time-varying environmental disturbances as well as various sailing conditions. The conventional methods have the disadvantages of low accuracy, poor robustness, and insufficient practical application ability. The rise of deep learning provides new opportunities for USV motion modeling and prediction. In this paper, a data-driven neural network model is constructed by combining a convolution neural network (CNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) for USV roll motion prediction. The CNN is used to extract spatially relevant and local time series features of the USV sensor data. The LSTM layer is exploited to reflect the long-term movement process of the USV and predict roll motion for the next moment. The fully connected layer is utilized to decode the LSTM output and calculate the final prediction results. The effectiveness of the proposed model was proved using USV roll motion prediction experiments based on two case studies from “JingHai-VI” and “JingHai-III” USVS of Shanghai University. Experimental results on a real data set indicated that our proposed model obviously outperformed the state-of-the-art methods. Full article

The academic excellence of universities around the globe has always been a matter of extended study and so has the quality of an institution’s presence in the World Wide Web. The purpose of this research is to study the extent to which a university’s academic excellence is related to the quality of its web presence. In order to achieve this, a method was devised that quantified the website quality and search engine optimization (SEO) performance of the university websites of the top 100 universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) Shanghai list. A variety of tools was employed to measure and test each website and produced a Web quality ranking, an SEO performance ranking, as well as a combined overall web ranking for each one. Comparing these rankings with the ARWU shows that academic excellence is moderately correlated with website quality, but SEO performance is not. Moreover, the overall web ranking also shows a moderate correlation with ARWU which seems to be positively influenced by website quality and negatively by SEO performance. Conclusively, the results of the research indicate that universities place particular emphasis on issues concerning website quality, while the utilization of SEO does not appear to be of equal importance, indicating possible room for improvement in this area. Full article

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has arisen as an architectural solution that responds to the needs of today’s overloaded Internet, departing from the traditional host-centric access paradigm. In this paper we focus on Named Data Networking (NDN), the most prominent ICN architecture. In the NDN framework, disseminated content is at the core of the design and providing trusted content is essential. In this paper, we provide an overview of reputation-based trust approaches, present their design trade-offs and argue that these approaches can consolidate NDN trust and security by working complementary to the existing credential-based schemes. Finally, we discuss future research directions and challenges. Full article

In order to achieve a multi-path routing algorithm with time delay and energy consumption balance to alleviate the energy holes around a sink, a multimedia independent multipath routing algorithm for internet of things (IoT) based on node hidden communication model is proposed in this paper. On the premise of satisfying the application delay, a multi-source multi-path routing algorithm is proposed by using the idea of software definition and fitting multiple curves to form independent multi-path routing. Through a sink node centralized programming control source node routing, according to the priority of the source node, the dynamic angle of the source node can be allocated, which effectively reduces the energy consumption of the network. In addition, considering that the Internet of Things has more perceptive nodes, limited computing and storage capacity, frequent joining and exiting operations and other factors, a hidden communication model of nodes is designed for the IoT. It is helpful to improve the level of privacy protection in the IoT, and to effectively improve the ability of nodes to resist attacks in the IoT. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm avoids the interference between paths and various network attacks to the greatest extent, and the energy consumption is relatively low under the requirement of quality of service (QoS) delay. Full article

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technologies provide suitability among physicians and patients because they are useful in numerous medical fields. Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) are one of the most crucial technologies from within the IoMT evolution of the healthcare system, whereby each patient is monitored by low-powered and lightweight sensors. When the WBSNs are integrated into IoMT networks, they are quite likely to overlap each other; thus, cooperation between WBSN sensors is possible. In this paper, we consider communication between WBSNs and beyond their communication range. Therefore, we propose inter-WBAN cooperation for the IoMT system, which is also known as inter-WBAN cooperation in an IoMT environment (IWC-IoMT). In this paper, first, a proposed architecture for the IoT health-based system is investigated. Then, a mathematical model of the outage probability for the IWC-IoMT is derived. Finally, the energy efficiency of the IWC-IoT is analysed and inspected. The simulation and numerical results show that the IWC-IoMT (cooperative IoMT) system provides superior performance compared to the non-cooperative system. Full article

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art technology for mobile systems. MCC enables portable and context-aware computation via mobile devices by exploiting virtually unlimited hardware and software resources offered by cloud computing servers. Software architecture helps to abstract the complexities of system design, development, and evolution phases to implement MCC systems effectively and efficiently. This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically map the state of the art on architecting MCC-based software. We have used an evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) approach to conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) based on 121 qualitatively selected research studies published from 2006 to 2019. The results of the SMS highlight that architectural solutions for MCC systems are mainly focused on supporting (i) software as a service for mobile computing, (ii) off-loading mobile device data to cloud-servers, (iii) internet of things, edge, and fog computing along with various aspects like (iv) security and privacy of mobile device data. The emerging research focuses on the existing and futuristic challenges that relate to MCC-based internet of things (IoTs), mobile-cloud edge systems, along with green and energy-efficient computing. The results of the SMS facilitate knowledge transfer that could benefit researchers and practitioners to understand the role of software architecture to develop the next generation of mobile-cloud systems to support internet-driven computing. Full article

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) have gained wide recognition in the field of natural language processing. However, due to the pre- and post-dependence of natural language structure, relying solely on CNN to implement text categorization will ignore the contextual meaning of words and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). The feature fusion model is divided into a multiple attention (MATT) CNN model and a bi-directional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) model. The CNN model inputs the word vector (word vector attention, part of speech attention, position attention) that has been labeled by the attention mechanism into our multi-attention mechanism CNN model. Obtaining the influence intensity of the target keyword on the sentiment polarity of the sentence, and forming the first dimension of the sentiment classification, the BiGRU model replaces the original BiLSTM and extracts the global semantic features of the sentence level to form the second dimension of sentiment classification. Then, using PCA to reduce the dimension of the two-dimensional fusion vector, we finally obtain a classification result combining two dimensions of keywords and sentences. The experimental results show that the proposed MATT-CNN+BiGRU fusion model has 5.94% and 11.01% higher classification accuracy on the MRD and SemEval2016 datasets, respectively, than the mainstream CNN+BiLSTM method. Full article

A mismatch between staffing ratios and service demand leads to overcrowding of patients in waiting rooms of health centers. Overcrowding consequently leads to excessive patient waiting times, incomplete preventive service delivery and disgruntled medical staff. Worse, due to the limited patient load that a health center can handle, patients may leave the clinic before the medical examination is complete. It is true that as one health center may be struggling with an excessive patient load, another facility in the vicinity may have a low patient turn out. A centralized hospital management system, where hospitals are able to timely exchange patient load information would allow excess patient load from an overcrowded health center to be re-assigned in a timely way to the nearest health centers. In this paper, a machine learning-based patient load prediction model for forecasting future patient loads is proposed. Given current and historical patient load data as inputs, the model outputs future predicted patient loads. Furthermore, we propose re-assigning excess patient loads to nearby facilities that have minimal load as a way to control overcrowding and reduce the number of patients that leave health facilities without receiving medical care as a result of overcrowding. The re-assigning of patients will imply a need for transportation for the patient to move from one facility to another. To avoid putting a further strain on the already fragmented ambulatory services, we assume the existence of a scheduled bus system and propose an Internet of Things (IoT) integrated smart bus system. The developed IoT system can be tagged on buses and can be queried by patients through representation state transfer application program interfaces (APIs) to provide them with the position of the buses through web app or SMS relative to their origin and destination stop. The back end of the proposed system is based on message queue telemetry transport, which is lightweight, data efficient and scalable, unlike the traditionally used hypertext transfer protocol. Full article

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is complex since many quality characteristics should be taken into account, for example, performance, reliability, and security. In this study, we investigate to what extent the current edge computing simulators support the analysis of qualities that are relevant to IoT architects who are designing an IoT system. We first identify the quality characteristics and metrics that can be evaluated through simulation. Then, we study the available simulators in order to assess which of the identified qualities they support. The results show that while several simulation tools for edge computing have been proposed, they focus on a few qualities, such as time behavior and resource utilization. Most of the identified qualities are not considered and we suggest future directions for further investigation to provide appropriate support for IoT architects. Full article

Nowadays, location-sharing applications (LSA) within social media enable users to share their location information at different levels of precision. Users on their side are willing to disclose this kind of information in order to represent themselves in a socially acceptable online way. However, they express privacy concerns regarding potential malware location-sharing applications, since users’ geolocation information can provide affiliations with their social identity attributes that enable the specification of their behavioral normativity, leading to sensitive information disclosure and privacy leaks. This paper, after a systematic review on previous social and privacy location research, explores the overlapping of these fields in identifying users’ social attributes through examining location attributes while online, and proposes a targeted set of location privacy attributes related to users’ socio-spatial characteristics within social media. Full article

In order to improve the network layer of the Internet of things to improve transmission reliability, save time delay and energy consumption, the Internet of things cooperative communication and intelligent agent technology were studied in this paper. In cooperative communication, a new cooperative communication algorithm KCN (k-cooperative node), and a reliability prediction model are proposed. The k value is determined by the end-to-end reliability. After k cooperative nodes are selected, other nodes enter dormancy. In aggregate traffic allocation, game theory is used to model the traffic equilibrium and end-to-end delay optimization scenarios. In practice, the optimal duty cycle can be calculated, which makes some cooperative nodes enter an idle state to save energy. Under the premise of guaranteeing end-to-end delay, it is shown that the reliability of the proposed KCN algorithm is better than that of the other existing routing protocols. In the aspect of intelligent agent, a Directional source grouping based multi-Agent Itinerary Planning (D-MIP) is proposed. This algorithm studies the routing problem of multi-agent parallel access to multiple source nodes. A directed source packet multi-agent routing planning algorithm is proposed. The iterative algorithm of each source node is limited to a sector, and the optimal intelligent agent route is obtained by selecting an appropriate angle. Compared with other algorithms, it is shown through a lot of simulated results that energy consumption and time delay has been saved by the proposed D-MIP algorithm. Full article

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an emerging communication paradigm built around content names. Securing ICN using named-based security is, therefore, a natural choice. For this paper, we designed and evaluated name-based security solutions that satisfy security requirements that are particular to ICN architectures. In order to achieve our goal, we leverage identity-based encryption, identity-based proxy re-encryption, and the emerging paradigm of decentralized identifiers. Our solutions support outsourcing content storage, content integrity protection and content authentication, and provenance verification, as well as access control. We show that our solutions have tolerable storage and computation overhead, thus proving their feasibility. Full article

Conversational agents are reshaping our communication environment and have the potential to inform and persuade in new and effective ways. In this paper, we present the underlying technologies and the theoretical background behind a health-care platform dedicated to supporting medical stuff and individuals with movement disabilities and to providing advanced monitoring functionalities in hospital and home surroundings. The framework implements an intelligent combination of two research areas: (1) sensor- and camera-based monitoring to collect, analyse, and interpret people behaviour and (2) natural machine–human interaction through an apprehensive virtual assistant benefiting ailing patients. In addition, the framework serves as an important assistant to caregivers and clinical experts to obtain information about the patients in an intuitive manner. The proposed approach capitalises on latest breakthroughs in computer vision, sensor management, speech recognition, natural language processing, knowledge representation, dialogue management, semantic reasoning, and speech synthesis, combining medical expertise and patient history. Full article

The search and rescue (SAR) scenario is complex and uncertain where a robot needs to understand the scenario to make smart decisions. Aiming at the knowledge representation (KR) in the field of SAR, this paper builds an ontology model that enables a robot to understand how to make smart decisions. The ontology is divided into three parts, namely entity ontology, environment ontology, and task ontology. Web Ontology Language (OWL) is adopted to represent these three types of ontology. Through ontology and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules, the robot infers the tasks to be performed according to the environment state and at the same time obtains the semantic information of the victims. Then, the paper proposes an ontology-based algorithm for task planning to get a sequence of atomic actions so as to complete the high-level inferred task. In addition, an indoor experiment was designed and built for the SAR scenario using a real robot platform—TurtleBot3. The correctness and usability of the ontology and the proposed methods are verified by experiments. Full article

Twitter is one of the most popular online social networks for spreading propaganda and words in the Arab region. Spammers are now creating rogue accounts to distribute adult content through Arabic tweets that Arabic norms and cultures prohibit. Arab governments are facing a huge challenge in the detection of these accounts. Researchers have extensively studied English spam on online social networks, while to date, social network spam in other languages has been completely ignored. In our previous study, we estimated that rogue and spam content accounted for approximately three quarters of all content with Arabic trending hashtags in Saudi Arabia. This alarming rate, supported by autonomous concurrent estimates, highlights the urgent need to develop adaptive spam detection methods. In this work, we collected a pure data set from spam accounts producing Arabic tweets. We applied lightweight feature engineering based on rogue content and user profiles. The 47 generated features were analyzed, and the best features were selected. Our performance results show that the random forest classification algorithm with 16 features performs best, with accuracy rates greater than 90%. Full article

Intelligent transportation solutions and smart information and communication technologies will be the core of future smart cities. For this purpose, these topics have captivated noteworthy interest in the investigation and construction of cleverer communication protocols or the application of artificial intelligence in the connection of in-vehicle devices by wireless networks, and in in-vehicle services for autonomous driving using high-precision positioning and sensing systems. This special issue has focused on the collection of high-quality papers aimed at solving open technical problems and challenges typical of mobile communications for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Full article

The advent of smart sensors, single system-on-chip computing devices, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing is facilitating the design and development of smart devices and services. These include smart meters, smart street lightings, smart gas stations, smart parking lots, and smart bus stops. Countries in the Gulf region have hot and humid weather around 6–7 months of the year, which might lead to uncomfortable conditions for public commuters. Transportation authorities have made some major enhancements to existing bus stops by installing air-conditioning units, but without any remote monitoring and control features. This paper proposes a smart IoT-based environmentally - friendly enhanced design for existing bus stop services in the United Arab Emirates. The objective of the proposed design was to optimize energy consumption through estimating bus stop occupancy, remotely monitor air conditioning and lights, automatically report utility breakdowns, and measure the air pollution around the area. In order to accomplish this, bus stops will be equipped with a WiFi-Based standalone microcontroller connected to sensors and actuators. The microcontroller transmits the sensor readings to a real-time database hosted in the cloud and incorporates a mobile app that notifies operators or maintenance personnel in the case of abnormal readings or breakdowns. The mobile app encompasses a map interface enabling operators to remotely monitor the conditions of bus stops such as the temperature, humidity, estimated occupancy, and air pollution levels. In addition to presenting the system’s architecture and detailed design, a system prototype is built to test and validate the proposed solution. Full article

Internet of Things is one of the most significant latest developments in computer science. It is common for modern computing infrastructures to partially consist of numerous low power devices that are characterized by high diversity in both hardware and software. Existing security models, approaches and solutions are not able to sufficiently protect such systems. In this paper we propose the use of lightweight agents installed at multiple internet of things (IoT) installations (e.g., smart-homes), in order to collaboratively detect distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks conducted by the use of IoT devices botnets. Specifically, agents exchange outbound traffic information in order to identify possible victims of DDoS attacks. This information exchange is governed by a blockchain smart contract, that ensures the integrity of both the procedure and the information. A simulation of the operation of the proposed methodology has been conducted in order to evaluate both its detection efficiency and its resilience against malicious agents that aim to falsify results. Full article

In the big data era, data are envisioned as critical resources with various values, e.g., business intelligence, management efficiency, and financial evaluations. Data sharing is always mandatory for value exchanges and profit promotion. Currently, certain big data markets have been created for facilitating data dissemination and coordinating data transaction, but we have to assume that such centralized management of data sharing must be trustworthy for data privacy and sharing fairness, which very likely imposes limitations such as joining admission, sharing efficiency, and extra costly commissions. To avoid these weaknesses, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based fair data exchange scheme, called FaDe. FaDe can enable de-centralized data sharing in an autonomous manner, especially guaranteeing trade fairness, sharing efficiency, data privacy, and exchanging automation. A fairness protocol based on bit commitment is proposed. An algorithm based on blockchain script architecture for a smart contract, e.g., by a bitcoin virtual machine, is also proposed and implemented. Extensive analysis justifies that the proposed scheme can guarantee data exchanging without a trusted third party fairly, efficiently, and automatically. Full article

Rapid online trading expansion and the bloom of internet technologies has raised the importance of effective product video presentations for online retailers. This article developed a model for the impacts of video presentations on purchase intention for digital and home appliance products. Four group experiments were designed, and empirical tests were performed. This research found that presenting videos on how to use digital and home appliance products increased purchase intention by raising the information gained by customers. Meanwhile, video tutorial information had insignificant effects related to the knowledge and experience of customers. Full article

Operation scheduling is one of the most practical optimization problems to efficiently manage the electric power supply and demand in microgrids. Although various microgrid-related techniques have been developed, there has been no established solution to the problem until now. This is because the formulated problem becomes a complicated mixed-integer programming problem having multiple optimization variables. The authors present a framework for this problem and its effective solution to obtain an operation schedule of the microgrid components considering their coordination. In the framework, trading electricity with traditional main power grids is included in the optimization target, and uncertainty originating from variable renewable energy sources is considered. In the solution, the formulated problem is reformulated to reduce the dimensions of its solution space, and, as a result, a combined algorithm of binary particle swarm optimization and quadratic programming is applicable. Through numerical simulations and discussions of their results, the validity of the authors’ proposal is verified. Full article

By offering low-latency and context-aware services, fog computing will have a peculiar role in the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications for smart environments. Unlike the conventional remote cloud, for which consolidated architectures and deployment options exist, many design and implementation aspects remain open when considering the latest fog computing paradigm. In this paper, we focus on the problems of dynamically discovering the processing and storage resources distributed among fog nodes and, accordingly, orchestrating them for the provisioning of IoT services for smart environments. In particular, we show how these functionalities can be effectively supported by the revolutionary Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm. Originally conceived to support named content delivery, NDN can be extended to request and provide named computation services, with NDN nodes acting as both content routers and in-network service executors. To substantiate our analysis, we present an NDN fog computing framework with focus on a smart campus scenario, where the execution of IoT services is dynamically orchestrated and performed by NDN nodes in a distributed fashion. A simulation campaign in ndnSIM, the reference network simulator of the NDN research community, is also presented to assess the performance of our proposal against state-of-the-art solutions. Results confirm the superiority of the proposal in terms of service provisioning time, paid at the expenses of a slightly higher amount of traffic exchanged among fog nodes. Full article

Power wireless private networks (PWPNs) have been highly developed in China in recent years. They provide a basis for the energy Internet of Things, which enables the exchange of energy information between devices. Although the power wireless private network is an imitation of the public cellular network, a number of special challenges remain in power private networks. Due to the lack of general standards for PWPNs at the beginning of deployment, there are now two independent PWPN systems in China: long-term evolution (LTE) 230 and LTE 1800. Each has its own core and access networks with independent hardware. In this paper, we propose a high-level design of multinetwork integration to allow LTE 230 and LTE 1800 to coexist. For core network integration, we propose a protocol controller to select the active protocol according to the user’s mode selection, since both LTE 230 and LTE 1800 evolved from the standard LTE system. For access network integration, we propose a multinetwork integration controller to help the device access the optimal cell. The simulation results show that the integrated system can retain the advantages of these two independent systems in terms of both capacity and coverage. Full article