The graph-based tag recommendation algorithm FolkRank can effectively utilize the relationships between three entities, namely users, items and tags, and achieve better tag recommendation performance. However, FolkRank does not consider the internal relationships of user-user, item-item and tag-tag. This leads to the failure of FolkRank to effectively map the tagging behavior which contains user neighbors and item neighbors to a tripartite graph. For item-item relationships, we can dig out items that are very similar to the target item, even though the target item may not have a strong connection to these similar items in the user-item-tag graph of FolkRank. Hence this paper proposes an improved FolkRank algorithm named FolkRank++, which fully considers the user-user and item-item internal relationships in tag recommendation by adding the correlation information between users or items. Based on the traditional FolkRank algorithm, an initial weight is also given to target user and target item's neighbors to supply the user-user and item-item relationships. The above work is mainly completed from two aspects: (1) Finding items similar to target item according to the attribute information, and obtaining similar users of the target user according to the history behavior of the user tagging items. (2) Calculating the weighted degree of items and users to evaluate their importance, then assigning initial weights to similar items and users. Experimental results show that this method has better recommendation performance.

Today, IoT devices are flooding, and traffic is increasing rapidly. The Internet of Things creates a variety of added value through connections between devices, while many devices are easily targeted by attackers due to security vulnerabilities. In the IoT environment, security diagnosis has problems such as having to provide different solutions for different types of devices in network situations where various types of devices are interlocked, personal leakage of security solutions themselves, and high cost, etc. To avoid such problems, a TCP-based active scan was presented. However, the TCP-based active scan has limitations that it is difficult to be applied to real-time systems due to long detection times. To complement this, this study uses UDP-based approaches. Specifically, a lightweight active scan algorithm that effectively identifies devices using UPnP protocols (SSDP, MDNS, and MBNS) that are most commonly used by manufacturers is proposed. The experimental results of this study have shown that devices can be distinguished by more than twice the true positive and recall at an average time of 1524 times faster than Nmap, which has a firm position in the field.

Fog computing aims to provide the solution of bandwidth, network latency and energy consumption problems of cloud computing. Likewise, management of data generated by healthcare IoT devices is one of the significant applications of fog computing. Huge amount of data is being generated by healthcare IoT devices and such types of data is required to be managed efficiently, with low latency, without failure, and with minimum energy consumption and low cost. Failures of task or node can cause more latency, maximum energy consumption and high cost. Thus, a failure free, cost efficient, and energy aware management and scheduling scheme for data generated by healthcare IoT devices not only improves the performance of the system but also saves the precious lives of patients because of due to minimum latency and provision of fault tolerance. Therefore, to address all such challenges with regard to data management and fault tolerance, we have presented a Fault Tolerant Data management (FTDM) scheme for healthcare IoT in fog computing. In FTDM, the data generated by healthcare IoT devices is efficiently organized and managed through well-defined components and steps. A two way fault-tolerant mechanism i.e., task-based fault-tolerance and node-based fault-tolerance, is provided in FTDM through which failure of tasks and nodes are managed. The paper considers energy consumption, execution cost, network usage, latency, and execution time as performance evaluation parameters. The simulation results show significantly improvements which are performed using iFogSim. Further, the simulation results show that the proposed FTDM strategy reduces energy consumption 3.97%, execution cost 5.09%, network usage 25.88%, latency 44.15% and execution time 48.89% as compared with existing Greedy Knapsack Scheduling (GKS) strategy. Moreover, it is worthwhile to mention that sometimes the patients are required to be treated remotely due to non-availability of facilities or due to some infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Thus, in such circumstances, the proposed strategy is significantly efficient.

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) enable their users to access Cloud computing and storage services from anywhere in quick and flexible manners through the Internet. With the basis of 'pay-as-you-go' model, it makes the interactions between CSPs and the users play a vital role in shaping the Cloud computing market. A pool of virtualized and dynamically scalable Cloud services that delivered on demand to the users is associated with guaranteed performance and cost-provisioning. It needed a costing scheme for determining suitable charges in order to secure lease pricing of the Cloud services. However, it is hard to meet the satisfied prices for both CSPs and users due to their conflicting needs. Furthermore, there is lack of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that allowing the users to take part into price negotiating process. The users may lose their interest to use Cloud services while reducing CSPs profit. Therefore, this paper proposes a generic costing scheme for Cloud services using General Equilibrium Theory (GET). GET helps to formulate the price function for various services' factors to match with various demands from the users. It is initially determined by identifying the market circumstances that a general equilibrium will be hold and reached. Specifically, there are two procedures of agreement made in response to (i) established equilibrium supply and demand, and (ii) service price formed and constructed in a price range. The SLAs in our costing scheme is integrated to satisfy both CSPs and users' needs while minimizing their conflicts. The price ranging strategy is deliberated to provide prices' options to the users with respect their budget limit. Meanwhile, the CSPs can adaptively charge based on users' preferences without losing their profit. The costing scheme is testable and analyzed in multi-tenant computing environments. The results from our simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed costing scheme provides better users' satisfaction while fostering fairness pricing in the Cloud market.

For higher-level requirements of urban planning and management and the recent development of "digital earth" and "digital city", it is urgent to establish protocols for the construction of three-dimensional digital city models. However, some problems still exist in the digital technology of the three-dimensional city model, such as insufficient precision of the three-dimensional model, not optimizing the scene and not considering the constraints of building codes. In view of those points, a method to interactively simulate a virtual city scene based on building codes is proposed in this paper. Firstly, some constraint functions are set up to restrict the models to adhere to the building codes, and an improved directional bounding box technique is utilized to solve the problem that geometric objects may intersect in a virtual city scene. The three-dimensional model invocation strategy is designed to convert two-dimensional layouts to a three-dimensional urban scene. A Leap Motion hardware device is used to interactively place the 3D models in a virtual scene. Finally, the design and construction of the three-dimensional scene are completed by using Unity3D. The experiment shows that this method can simulate urban virtual scenes that strictly adhere to building codes in a virtual scene of the city environment, but also provide information and decision-making functions for urban planning and management.

Electronic Records Management System (ERMS) is a computer program or set of applications that is utilized for keeping up to date records along with their storage. ERMS has been extensively utilized for enhancing the performance of academic institutions. The system assists in the planning and decision-making processes, which in turn enhances the competencies. However, although ERMS is significant in supporting the process of decision-making, the majority of organizations have failed to take an initiative to implement it, taking into account that are some implementing it without an appropriate framework, and thus resulted in the practice which does not meet the accepted standard. Therefore, this study identifies the factors influencing the adoption of ERMS among employees of HLI in Yemen and the role of such adoption in the decision-making process, using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) along with Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE) as the underpinning theories. The study conducts a cross-sectional survey with a questionnaire as the technique for data collection, distributed to 364 participants in various Yemeni public Higher Learning Institutions (HLI). Using AMOS as a statistical method, the findings revealed there are significant and positive relationships between technology factors (effort expectancy, performance expectancy, IT infrastructure and security), organizational factors (top management support, financial support, training, and policy),environmental factors (competitiveness pressure, facilitating conditions and trust) and behavioral intention to adopt ERMS, which in return has a significant relationship with the process of decision-making in HLI. The study also presents a variety of theoretical and empirical contributions that enrich the body of knowledge in the field of technology adoption and the electronic record's domain.

With the drastic growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry, global energy consumption is exponentially increased by mobile communications. The huge energy consumption and increased environmental awareness have triggered great interests on the research of dynamic distribution of cell user and traffic, and then designing the energy efficient cellular network. In this paper, we explore the temporal and spatial characteristics of human mobility and traffic distribution using real data set. The analysis results of cell traffic illustrate the tidal effect in temporal and spatial dimensions and obvious periodic characteristics which can be used to design Base Station (BS) dynamic with sleeping or shut-down strategy. At the same time, we designed a new Cell Zooming and BS cooperation mode. Through simulation experiments, we found that running in this mode can save about 35% of energy consumption and guarantee the required quality of service.

Multimodal biometric-based recognition has been an active topic because of its higher convenience in recent years. Due to high user convenience of finger, finger-based personal identification has been widely used in practice. Hence, taking Finger-Print (FP), Finger-Vein (FV) and Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP) as the ingredients of characteristic, their feature representation were helpful for improving the universality and reliability in identification. To usefully fuse the multimodal finger-features together, a new robust representation algorithm was proposed based on hierarchical model. Firstly, to obtain more robust features, the feature maps were obtained by Gabor magnitude feature coding and then described by Local Binary Pattern (LBP). Secondly, the LGBP-based feature maps were processed hierarchically in bottom-up mode by variable rectangle and circle granules, respectively. Finally, the intension of each granule was represented by Local-invariant Gray Features (LGFs) and called Hierarchical Local-Gabor-based Gray Invariant Features (HLGGIFs). Experiment results revealed that the proposed algorithm is capable of improving rotation variation of finger-pose, and achieving lower Equal Error Rate (EER) in our homemade database.

In this work, we empirically evaluated the efficiency of the recent EfficientNetB0 model to identify and diagnose malaria parasite infections in blood smears. The dataset used was collected and classified by relevant experts from the Lister Hill National Centre for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC). We prepared our samples with minimal image transformations as opposed to others, as we focused more on the feature extraction capability of the EfficientNetB0 baseline model. We applied transfer learning to increase the initial feature sets and reduced the training time to train our model. We then fine-tuned it to work with our proposed layers and re-trained the entire model to learn from our prepared dataset. The highest overall accuracy attained from our evaluated results was 94.70% from fifty epochs and followed by 94.68% within just ten. Additional visualization and analysis using the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) algorithm visualized how effectively our fine-tuned EfficientNetB0 detected infections better than other recent state-of-the-art DCNN models. This study, therefore, concludes that when fine-tuned, the recent EfficientNetB0 will generate highly accurate deep learning solutions for the identification of malaria parasites in blood smears without the need for stringent pre-processing, optimization, or data augmentation of images.

Recently, with the development of technology, computer vision research based on the human visual system has been actively conducted. Saliency maps have been used to highlight areas that are visually interesting within the image, but they can suffer from low performance due to external factors, such as an indistinct background or light source. In this study, existing color, brightness, and contrast feature maps are subjected to multiple shape and orientation filters and then connected to a fully connected layer to determine pixel intensities within the image based on location-based weights. The proposed method demonstrates better performance in separating the background from the area of interest in terms of color and brightness in the presence of external elements and noise. Location-based weight normalization is also effective in removing pixels with high intensity that are outside of the image or in non-interest regions. Our proposed method also demonstrates that multi-filter normalization can be processed faster using parallel processing.

For small image registration, feature-based approaches are likely to fail as feature detectors cannot detect enough feature points from low-resolution images. The classic FFT approach's prediction accuracy is high, but the registration time can be relatively long, about several seconds to register one image pair. To achieve real-time and high-precision rigid registration for small images, we apply deep neural networks for supervised rigid transformation prediction, which directly predicts the transformation parameters. We train deep registration models with rigidly transformed CIFAR-10 images and STL-10 images, and evaluate the generalization ability of deep registration models with transformed CIFAR-10 images, STL-10 images, and randomly generated images. Experimental results show that the deep registration models we propose can achieve comparable accuracy to the classic FFT approach for small CIFAR-10 images (32×32) and our LSTM registration model takes less than 1ms to register one pair of images. For moderate size STL-10 images (96×96), FFT significantly outperforms deep registration models in terms of accuracy but is also considerably slower. Our results suggest that deep registration models have competitive advantages over conventional approaches, at least for small images.

Multipath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) is a transport layer protocol that enables multiple TCP connections across various paths. Due to path heterogeneity, it incurs more energy in a multipath wireless network. Recent work presents a set of approaches described in the literature to support systems for energy consumption in terms of their performance, objectives and address issues based on their design goals. The existing solutions mainly focused on the primary system model but did not discourse the overall system performance. Therefore, this paper capitalized a novel stochastically multipath scheduling scheme for data and path capacity variations. The scheduling problem formulated over MPTCP as a stochastic optimization, whose objective is to maximize the average throughput, avoid network congestion, and makes the system more stable with greater energy efficiency. To design an online algorithm that solves the formulated problem over the time slots by considering its mindrift-plus penalty form. The proposed solution was examined under extensive simulations to evaluate the anticipated stochastic optimized MPTCP (so-MPTCP) outcome and compared it with the base MPTCP and the energy-efficient MPTCP (eMPTCP) protocols. Simulation results justify the proposed algorithm's credibility by achieving remarkable improvements, higher throughput, reduced energy costs, and lower-end to end delay.

The present work addresses the challenging problem of coordinating power allocation with interference management in multi-robot networks by applying the promising expansion capabilities of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and full duplex systems, which achieves it for maximizing the throughput of networks under the impacts of Doppler frequency shifts and external jamming. The proposed power allocation with interference coordination formulation accounts for three types of the interference, including cross-tier, co-tier, and mixed-tier interference signals with cluster head nodes operating in different full-duplex modes, and their signal-to-noise-ratios are respectively derived under the impacts of Doppler frequency shifts and external jamming. In addition, various optimization algorithms, including two centralized iterative optimization algorithms and three decentralized optimization algorithms, are applied for solving the complex and non-convex combinatorial optimization problem associated with the power allocation and interference coordination. Simulation results demonstrate that the overall network throughput increases gradually to some degree with increasing numbers of MIMO antennas. In addition, increasing the number of clusters to a certain extent increases the overall network throughput, although internal interference becomes a severe problem for further increases in the number of clusters. Accordingly, applications of multi-robot networks require that a balance should be preserved between robot deployment density and communication capacity.

One of the biggest challenges that the software industry is facing today is to create highly efficient applications without affecting the quality of healthcare system software. The demand for the provision of software with high quality protection has seen a rapid increase in the software business market. Moreover, it is worthless to offer extremely user-friendly software applications with no ideal security. Therefore a need to find optimal solutions and bridge the difference between accessibility and protection by offering accessible software services for defense has become an imminent prerequisite. Several research endeavours on usable security assessments have been performed to fill the gap between functionality and security. In this context, several Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approaches have been implemented on different usability and security attributes so as to assess the usable-security of software systems. However, only a few specific studies are based on using the integrated approach of fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) technique for assessing the significant usable-security of hospital management software. Therefore, in this research study, the authors have employed an integrated methodology of fuzzy logic, ANP and TOPSIS to estimate the usable - security of Hospital Management System Software. For the intended objective, the study has taken into account 5 usable-security factors at first tier and 16 sub-factors at second tier with 6 hospital management system softwares as alternative solutions. To measure the weights of parameters and their relation with each other, Fuzzy ANP is implemented. Thereafter, Fuzzy TOPSIS methodology was employed and the rating of alternatives was calculated on the foundation of the proximity to the positive ideal solution.

As the next-generation network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN) has great potential. But how to forward data packets safely is a big challenge today. In SDN, packets are transferred according to flow rules which are made and delivered by the controller. Once flow rules are modified, the packets might be redirected or dropped. According to related research, we believe that the key to forward data flows safely is keeping the consistency of flow rules. However, existing solutions place little emphasis on the safety of flow rules. After summarizing the shortcomings of the existing solutions, we propose FRChain to ensure the security of SDN data forwarding. FRChain is a novel scheme that uses blockchain to secure flow rules in SDN and to detect compromised nodes in the network when the proportion of malicious nodes is less than one-third. The scheme places the flow strategies into blockchain in form of transactions. Once an unmatched flow rule is detected, the system will issue the problem by initiating a vote and possible attacks will be deduced based on the results. To simulate the scheme, we utilize BigchainDB, which has good performance in data processing, to handle transactions. The experimental results show that the scheme is feasible, and the additional overhead for network performance and system performance is less than similar solutions. Overall, FRChain can detect suspicious behaviors and deduce malicious nodes to keep the consistency of flow rules in SDN.

Recently, with the diversification of media services and the development of smart devices, users have more opportunities to use digital content, such as movies, dramas, and music; consequently, the size of the copyright market expands simultaneously. However, there are piracy sites that generate revenue by illegal use of copyrighted works. This has led to losses for copyright holders, and the scale of copyrighted works infringed due to the ever-increasing number of piracy sites has increased. To prevent this, government agencies respond to copyright infringement by monitoring piracy sites using online monitoring and countermeasure strategies for infringement. However, the detection and blocking process consumes a significant amount of time when compared to the rate of generating new piracy sites. Hence, online monitoring is less effective. Additionally, given that piracy sites are sophisticated and refined in the same way as legitimate sites, it is necessary to accurately distinguish and block a site that is involved in copyright infringement. Therefore, in this study, we analyze features of piracy sites and based on this analysis, we propose an intelligent detection technique for piracy sites that automatically classifies and detects whether a site is involved in infringement.

In the system of ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), only when the attributes of data user meets the access structure established by the encrypter, the data user can perform decryption operation. So CP-ABE has been widely used in personal health record system (PHR). However, the problem of key abuse consists in the CP-ABE system. The semi-trusted authority or the authorized user to access the system may disclose the key because of personal interests, resulting in illegal users accessing the system. Consequently, aiming at two kinds of existing key abuse problems: (1) semi-trusted authority redistributes keys to unauthorized users, (2) authorized users disclose keys to unauthorized users, we put forward a CP-ABE scheme that has authority accountability, user traceability and supports arbitrary monotonous access structures. Specifically, we employ an auditor to make a fair ruling on the malicious behavior of users. Besides, to solve the problem of user leaving from the system, we use an indirect revocation method based on trust tree to implement user revocation. Compared with other existing schemes, we found that our solution achieved user revocation at an acceptable time cost. In addition, our scheme is proved to be fully secure in the standard model.

Personal health records (PHRs) is an electronic medical system that enables patients to acquire, manage and share their health data. Nevertheless, data confidentiality and user privacy in PHRs have not been handled completely. As a fine-grained access control over health data, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) has an ability to guarantee data confidentiality. However, existing CP-ABE solutions for PHRs are facing some new challenges in access control, such as policy privacy disclosure and dynamic policy update. In terms of addressing these problems, we propose a privacy protection and dynamic share system (PPADS) based on CP-ABE for PHRs, which supports full policy hiding and flexible access control. In the system, attribute information of access policy is fully hidden by attribute bloom filter. Moreover, data user produces a transforming key for the PHRs Cloud to change access policy dynamically. Furthermore, relied on security analysis, PPADS is selectively secure under standard model. Finally, the performance comparisons and simulation results demonstrate that PPADS is suitable for PHRs.

In the 5G era, the communication networks tend to be ultra-densified, which will improve the accuracy of indoor positioning and further improve the quality of positioning service. In this study, we propose an indoor three-dimensional (3D) dynamic reconstruction fingerprint matching algorithm (DSR-FP) in a 5G ultra-dense network. The first step of the algorithm is to construct a local fingerprint matrix having low-rank characteristics using partial fingerprint data, and then reconstruct the local matrix as a complete fingerprint library using the FPCA reconstruction algorithm. In the second step of the algorithm, a dynamic base station matching strategy is used to screen out the best quality service base stations and multiple sub-optimal service base stations. Then, the fingerprints of the other base station numbers are eliminated from the fingerprint database to simplify the fingerprint database. Finally, the 3D estimated coordinates of the point to be located are obtained through the K-nearest neighbor matching algorithm. The analysis of the simulation results demonstrates that the average relative error between the reconstructed fingerprint database by the DSR-FP algorithm and the original fingerprint database is 1.21%, indicating that the accuracy of the reconstruction fingerprint database is high, and the influence of the location error can be ignored. The positioning error of the DSR-FP algorithm is less than 0.31 m. Furthermore, at the same signal-to-noise ratio, the positioning error of the DSR-FP algorithm is lesser than that of the traditional fingerprint matching algorithm, while its positioning accuracy is higher.

This paper proposes a novel two-way relaying (TWR) approach for a two-relay wireless network based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where two terminals exchange messages with a cellular base station (BS) via two intermediate relay stations (RSs). We propose a NOMA-based TWR approach with two relaying schemes, i.e., amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF), referred to as NOMA-AF and NOMA-DF. The sum-rate performance of our proposed NOMA-AF and NOMA-DF is analyzed. A closed-form sum-rate upper bound for the NOMA-AF is obtained, and the exact ergodic sum-rate of NOMA-DF is also derived. The asymptotic sum-rate of NOMA-AF and NOMA-DF is also analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional orthogonal multiple access based transmission schemes. It is also shown that increasing the transmit power budget of the relays only cannot always improve the sum-rates.