No abstract

Wireless Body Area Network is an emerging technology that is used primarily in the area of healthcare applications. It is a low-cost network having the capability of transportability and adaptability. It can be used in location independent and long-term remote monitoring of people without disturbing their daily activities. In a typical WBAN system, sensing devices are either implanted or etched into the human body that continuously monitors his physiological parameters or vital signs. In such a network, trusts among the stakeholders (healthcare providers, users, and medical staff, etc.) are found of high importance and regarded as the critical success factor for the reliability of information exchange among them. In remote patient monitoring, the implementation of trust and privacy preservation is crucial, as vital parameters are being communicated to remote locations. Nonetheless, its widespread use, WBAN, has severe trust and privacy risks, limiting its adaptation in healthcare applications. To address trust and privacy-related issues, reliable communication solutions are widely used in WBANs. Given the motivation, in this paper, we have proposed a trust-based communication scheme to ensure the reliability and privacy of WBAN. To ensure reliability, a cooperative communication approach is used, while for privacy preservation, a cryptography mechanism is used. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using MATLAB simulator. The output results demonstrated that the proposed scheme increases service delivery ratio, reliability, and trust with reduced average delay. Furthermore, a fuzzy-logic method used for ranking benchmark schemes, that has been concluded that the proposed scheme has on top using comparative performance ranking.

The automotive industry is growing day by day and personal vehicles have become a significant transportation resource now. With the rise in private transportation vehicles, getting a free space for parking one's car, especially in populated areas, has not only become difficult but also results in several issues, such as: (i) traffic congestion, (ii) wastage of time, (iii) environmental pollution, and most importantly (iv) unnecessary fuel consumption. On the other hand, car parking spaces in urban areas are not increasing at the same rate as the vehicles on roads. Therefore, smart car parking systems have become an essential need to address the issues mentioned above. Several researchers have attempted to automate the parking space allocation by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. Significant work has been done in the domains of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Cloud Computing, Fog Computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) to facilitate the advancements in smart parking services. Few researchers have proposed methods for smart car parking using the cloud computing infrastructures. However, latency is a significant concern in cloudbased applications, including intelligent transportation and especially in smart car parking systems. Fog computing, bringing the cloud computing resources in proximate vicinity to the network edge, overcomes not only the latency issue but also provides significant improvements, such as on-demand scaling, resource mobility, and security. The primary motivation to employ fog computing in the proposed approach is to minimize the latency as well as network usage in the overall smart car parking system. For demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for reducing the lag and network usage, simulations have been performed in iFogSim and the results have been compared with that of the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking system. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed fog-based implementation of the efficient parking system minimizes latency significantly. It is also observed that the proposed fog-based implementation reduces the overall network usage in contrast to the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking. INDEX TERMS Fog computing, smart car parking, fog-based smart car parking, image processing.

Speaker identification refers to the process of recognizing human voice using artificial intelligence techniques. Speaker identification technologies are widely applied in voice authentication, security and surveillance, electronic voice eavesdropping, and identity verification. In the speaker identification process, extracting discriminative and salient features from speaker utterances is an important task to accurately identify speakers. Various features for speaker identification have been recently proposed by researchers. Most studies on speaker identification have utilized short-time features, such as perceptual linear predictive (PLP) coefficients and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), due to their capability to capture the repetitive nature and efficiency of signals. Various studies have shown the effectiveness of MFCC features in correctly identifying speakers. However, the performances of these features degrade on complex speech datasets, and therefore, these features fail to accurately identify speaker characteristics. To address this problem, this study proposes a novel fusion of MFCC and time-based features (MFCCT), which combines the effectiveness of MFCC and time-domain features to improve the accuracy of text-independent speaker identification (SI) systems. The extracted MFCCT features were fed as input to a deep neural network (DNN) to construct the speaker identification model. Results showed that the proposed MFCCT features coupled with DNN outperformed existing baseline MFCC and time-domain features on the LibriSpeech dataset. In addition, DNN obtained better classification results compared with five machine learning algorithms that were recently utilized in speaker recognition. Moreover, this study evaluated the effectiveness of one-level and two-level classification methods for speaker identification. The experimental results showed that two-level classification presented better results than one-level classification. The proposed features and classification model for identifying a speaker can be widely applied to different types of speaker datasets.

Research on wireless sensor network (WSN) has increased tremendously throughout the years. In WSN, sensor nodes are deployed to operate autonomously in remote environments. Depending on the network orientation, WSN can be of two types: flat network and hierarchical or cluster-based network. Various advantages of cluster-based WSN are energy efficiency, better network communication, efficient topology management, minimized delay, and so forth. Consequently, clustering has become a key research area in WSN. Different approaches for WSN, using cluster concepts, have been proposed. The objective of this paper is to review and analyze the latest prominent cluster-based WSN algorithms using various measurement parameters. In this paper, unique performance metrics are designed which efficiently evaluate prominent clustering schemes. Moreover, we also develop taxonomy for the classification of the clustering schemes. Based on performance metrics, quantitative and qualitative analyses are performed to compare the advantages and disadvantages of the algorithms. Finally, we also put forward open research issues in the development of low cost, scalable, robust clustering schemes.