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Fossil-fuel-based power generation leads to higher energy costs and environmental impacts. Solar and wind energy are abundant important renewable energy sources (RES) that make the largest contribution to replacing fossil-fuel-based energy consumption. However, the uncertain solar radiation and highly fluctuating weather parameters of solar and wind energy require an accurate and reliable forecasting mechanism for effective and efficient load management, cost reduction, green environment, and grid stability. From the existing literature, artificial neural networks (ANN) are a better means for prediction, but the ANN-based renewable energy forecasting techniques lose prediction accuracy due to the high uncertainty of input data and random determination of initial weights among different layers of ANN. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a harmony search algorithm (HSA)-optimized ANN model for reliable and accurate prediction of solar and wind energy. In this study, we combined ANN with HSA and provided ANN feedback for its weights adjustment to HSA, instead of ANN. Then, the HSA optimized weights were assigned to the edges of ANN instead of random weights, and this completes the training of ANN. Extensive simulations were carried out and our proposed HSA-optimized ANN model for solar irradiation forecast achieved the values of MSE = 0.04754, MAE = 0.18546, MAPE = 0.32430%, and RMSE = 0.21805, whereas our proposed HSA-optimized ANN model for wind speed prediction achieved the values of MSE = 0.30944, MAE = 0.47172, MAPE = 0.12896%, and RMSE = 0.55627. Simulation results prove the supremacy of our proposed HSA-optimized ANN models compared to state-of-the-art solar and wind energy forecasting techniques.

Geographically distributed cloud data centers (DCs) consume enormous amounts of energy to meet the ever-increasing processing and storage demands of users. The brown energy generated using fossil fuels is expensive and significantly contributes to global warming. Considering the environmental impact caused by the high carbon emissions and relatively high energy cost of brown energy, we propose the integration of renewable energy sources (RES), especially solar and wind energy, with brown energy to power cloud data centers. In our earlier study, we addressed the intermittency of renewable energy sources, where we replaced the random initialization of artificial neural network (ANN) edge weights with the harmony search algorithm (HSA)-optimized assignment of weights. This study incorporated reliably forecast solar and wind energy into the input parameters of our proposed green energy manager (GEM), for cost minimization, carbon emission minimization, and better energy management of cloud DCs, to make our current study more reliable and trustworthy. Four power sources, on-site solar energy and wind energy, off-site solar energy and wind energy, energy stored in energy storage devices, and brown energy, were considered in this study and simulations were carried out for three different cases. The simulation results showed that case 1 (all brown) was 58% more expensive and caused 71% higher carbon emissions than case 2.1 (cost minimization). Case 1 (all brown) was 39% more expensive and had 80% higher carbon emissions than case 2.2 (carbon emission minimization). The simulation results justify the necessity and importance of the GEM, and finally the results proved that our proposed GEM is less expensive and more environmentally friendly.

Like smart phones, the recent years have seen an increased usage of internet of things (IoT) technology. IoT devices, being resource constrained due to smaller size, are vulnerable to various security threats. Recently, many distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks generated with the help of IoT botnets affected the services of many websites. The destructive botnets need to be detected at the early stage of infection. Machine-learning models can be utilized for early detection of botnets. This paper proposes one-class classifier-based machine-learning solution for the detection of IoT botnets in a heterogeneous environment. The proposed one-class classifier, which is based on one-class KNN, can detect the IoT botnets at the early stage with high accuracy. The proposed machine-learning-based model is a lightweight solution that works by selecting the best features leveraging well-known filter and wrapper methods for feature selection. The proposed strategy is evaluated over different datasets collected from varying network scenarios. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique shows improved performance, consistent across three different datasets used for evaluation.

In mobile edge computing (MEC), mobile devices limited to computation and memory resources offload compute-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers. User movement causes frequent handovers in 5G urban networks. The resultant delays in task execution due to unknown user position and base station lead to increased energy consumption and resource wastage. The current MEC offloading solutions separate computation offloading from user mobility. For task offloading, techniques that predict the user’s future location do not consider user direction. We propose a framework termed COME-UP Computation Offloading in mobile edge computing with Long-short term memory (LSTM) based user direction prediction. The nature of the mobility data is nonlinear and leads to a time series prediction problem. The LSTM considers the previous mobility features, such as location, velocity, and direction, as input to a feed-forward mechanism to train the learning model and predict the next location. The proposed architecture also uses a fitness function to calculate priority weights for selecting an optimum edge server for task offloading based on latency, energy, and server load. The simulation results show that the latency and energy consumption of COME-UP are lower than the baseline techniques, while the edge server utilization is enhanced.

Vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) are vital towards the success and comfort of self-driving as well as semi-automobile vehicles. Such vehicles rely heavily on data management and the exchange of Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) for external communication with the environment. VANETs are vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including Black Hole, Gray Hole, wormhole, and rush attacks. These attacks are aimed at disrupting traffic between cars and on the roadside. The discovery of Black Hole attack has become an increasingly critical problem due to widespread adoption of autonomous and connected vehicles (ACVs). Due to the critical nature of ACVs, delay or failure of even a single packet can have disastrous effects, leading to accidents. In this work, we present a neural network-based technique for detection and prevention of rushed Black and Gray Hole attacks in vehicular networks. The work also studies novel systematic reactions protecting the vehicle against dangerous behavior. Experimental results show a superior detection rate of the proposed system in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques.

Data center facilities play a vital role in present and forthcoming information and communication technologies. Internet giants, such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon hold large data centers to provide cloud computing services and web hosting applications. Due to rapid growth in data center size and complexity, it is essential to highlight important design aspects and challenges of data centers. This article presents market segmentation of the leading data center operators and discusses the infrastructural considerations, namely energy consumption, power usage effectiveness, cost structure, and system reliability constraints. Moreover, it presents data center network design, classification of the data center servers, recent developments, and future trends of the data center industry. Furthermore, the emerging paradigm of mobile cloud computing is debated with respect to the research issues. Preliminary results for the energy consumption of task scheduling techniques are also provided.

High-speed internet has boosted clients’ traffic needs. Content caching on mobile edge computing (MEC) servers reduces traffic and latency. Caching with MEC faces difficulties such as user mobility, limited storage, varying user preferences, and rising video streaming needs. The current content caching techniques consider user mobility and content popularity to improve the experience. However, no present solution addresses user preferences and mobility, affecting caching decisions. We propose mobility- and user-preferences-aware caching for MEC. Using time series, the proposed system finds mobility patterns and groups nearby trajectories. Using cosine similarity and CF, we predict and cache user-requested content. CF predicts the popularity of grouped-based content to improve the cache hit ratio and reduce delay compared to baseline techniques.

Smart energy monitoring and analysis based on image recognition technology can provide more accurate and real-time data support for energy systems, improving the efficiency and level of energy management. The method is sensitive to factors such as image quality, illumination, and angle, and when the image quality is not high, the recognition effect may be poor. Some methods, such as feature extraction and deep learning methods, have a large amount of computation and relatively poor real-time performance, which may affect the timeliness of energy monitoring. Therefore, this study conducts a study on smart energy monitoring and analysis methods based on image recognition technology. The energy monitoring instrument panel is preprocessed with brightness adjustment and Hough transform. After extracting the pointer instrument panel, the pointer detection and angle calculation are performed by using connected domain analysis, thinning algorithm, line fitting, and pointer direction judgment mechanism. The energy monitoring instrument reading recognition method is given. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through experimental results analysis.

Vehicular edge networks (VENs) connect vehicles to share data and infotainment content collaboratively to improve network performance. Due to technological advancements, data growth is accelerating, making it difficult to always connect mobile devices and locations. For vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, vehicles are equipped with onboard units (OBU) and roadside units (RSU). Through back-haul, all user-uploaded data is cached in the cloud server’s main database. Caching stores and delivers database data on demand. Pre-caching the data on the upcoming predicted server, closest to the user, before receiving the request will improve the system’s performance. OBUs, RSUs, and base stations (BS) cache data in VENs to fulfill user requests rapidly. Pre-caching reduces data retrieval costs and times. Due to storage and computing expenses, complete data cannot be stored on a single device for vehicle caching. We reduce content delivery delays by using the cuckoo search optimization algorithm with cooperative content caching. Cooperation among end users in terms of data sharing with neighbors will positively affect delivery delays. The proposed model considers cooperative content caching based on popularity and accurate vehicle position prediction using K-means clustering. Performance is measured by caching cost, delivery cost, response time, and cache hit ratio. Regarding parameters, the new algorithm outperforms the alternative.

Encryption Protocols e.g., HTTPS is utilized to secure the traffic between servers and clients for YouTube and other video streaming services, and to further secure the communication, VPNs are used. However, these protocols are not sufficient to hide the identity of the videos from someone who can sniff the network traffic. The present work explores the methodologies and features to identify the videos in a VPN and non-VPN network traffic. To identify such videos, a side-channel attack using a Sequential Convolution Neural Network is proposed. The results demonstrate that a sequence of bytes per second from even one-minute sniffing of network traffic is sufficient to predict the video with high accuracy. The accuracy is increased to 90% accuracy in the non-VPN, 66% accuracy in the VPN, and 77% in the mixed VPN and non-VPN traffic, for models with two-minute sniffing.