An Enhanced Cooperative Communication Scheme for Physical Uplink Shared Channel in NB-IoT

Wireless Personal Communications - Smart Home is one of the most established applications of the Internet of Things. Almost every equipment we use in our daily life—appliances, electric...     

Optimized Tuned Deep Learning Model for Chronic Kidney Disease Classification

In recent times, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing (CC) paradigms are commonly employed in different healthcare applications. IoT gadgets generate huge volumes of patient data in healthcare domain, which can be examined on cloud over the available storage and computation resources in mobile gadgets. Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is one of the deadliest diseases that has high mortality rate across the globe. The current research work presents a novel IoT and cloud-based CKD diagnosis model called Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA)-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) model abbreviated as FPA-DNN. The steps involved in the presented FPA-DNN model are data collection, preprocessing, Feature Selection (FS), and classification. Primarily, the IoT gadgets are utilized in the collection of a patient’s health information. The proposed FPA-DNN model deploys Oppositional Crow Search (OCS) algorithm for FS, which selects the optimal subset of features from the preprocessed data. The application of FPA helps in tuning the DNN parameters for better classification performance. The simulation analysis of the proposed FPA-DNN model was performed against the benchmark CKD dataset. The results were examined under different aspects. The simulation outcomes established the superior performance of FPA-DNN technique by achieving the highest sensitivity of 98.80%, specificity of 98.66%, accuracy of 98.75%, F-score of 99%, and kappa of 97.33%.     

Novel Compact UWB Band Notch Antenna Design for Body-Centric Communications

In this paper, a novel and compact ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna with band-notched characteristics for body-centric communication is examined and implemented. The shape of the designed antenna looks like a ‘swan’ with a slotted patch. The performance parameters of this antenna for both the free space and on-body scenario for body-centric communication are analyzed and investigated through the simulation process using Computer Simulation Technology (CST). This antenna can avoid the interference caused by Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) (5.15–5.825 GHz) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) (5.25–5.85 GHz) systems with a band notch because of newly designed UWB antenna is revised small form factor sized. At first, the performance parameters like return loss response, gain, radiation patterns, and radiation efficiency on the free space of this UWB antenna are evaluated. After that, the on-body performance parameters of the antenna are also examined to place the antenna at various distances like 2 mm, 4 mm, 6 mm, 8 mm, and 10 mm away from 3-layers of phantom body model at frequencies of 3.5 GHz, 5.2 GHz, 5.8 GHz, 8 GHz, and 10 GHz. All the on-body performance parameter results are compared and analyzed with free space performance parameter results. Lastly, by changing patch slot length and ground plane length, parametric studies were done for performance comparison. Due to its compact size, novel shape and significant on-body performance, the proposed antenna is very suitable for multi-purpose healthcare applications and sports performance monitoring.     

Miniaturized Novel UWB Band-Notch Textile Antenna for Body Area Networks

This paper presents the design and analysis of a miniaturized and novel wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) band-notch textile antenna for Body Area Networks (BANs). The major goal of building the antenna for wearable applications with band notch in X-band is to reject the downlink band (7.25 to 7.75 GHz) of satellite communication in the UWB frequency ranges of 3.1–10.6 GHz to keep away from interference. Computer Simulation Technology (CST) TM Microwave Studio, which is user-friendly and reliable, was used to model and simulate the antenna. The radiating element of the antenna is designed on Jeans’ textile substrate, which has a relative permittivity of 1.7. The thickness of the jeans’ fabric substrate has been considered to be 1 mm. Return loss, gain, bandwidth, impedance, radiation, and total efficiency, and radiation patterns are presented and investigated. The antenna is simulated placed on the three layers of the human body model, and the on-body results are summarized in comparison with free space. Results and analysis indicate that this antenna has good band-notch characteristics in the frequency range of 7.25 GHz to 7.75 GHz. The parametric study varying the relative permittivity of Jeans’ fabric substrate of this antenna is also evaluated. In addition, effects on the antenna parameters of variation of ground plane size have been reported. The antenna is 25 mm × 16 mm × 1.07 mm in total volume. Results reveal that this antenna achieves the design goal and performs well both in free space and on the body.     

Correction to: An Enhanced Cooperative Communication Scheme for Physical Uplink Shared Channel in NB‑IoT

Wireless Personal Communications - There were errors in the first and fourth authors' names in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.     

Analytic Beta-Wavelet Transform-Based Digital Image Watermarking for Secure Transmission

The rapid development in the information technology field has introduced digital watermark technologies as a solution to prevent unauthorized copying and redistribution of data. This article introduces a self-embedded image verification and integrity scheme. The images are firstly split into dedicated segments of the same block sizes. Then, different Analytic Beta-Wavelet (ABW) orthogonal filters are utilized for embedding a self-segment watermark for image segment using a predefined method. ABW orthogonal filter coefficients are estimated to improve image reconstruction under different block sizes. We conduct a comparative study comparing the watermarked images using three kinds of ABW filters for block sizes 64 × 64, 128 × 128, and 256 × 256. We embed the watermark using the ABW-based image watermarking method in the 2-level middle frequency sub-bands of the ABW digital image coefficients. The imperceptibility and robustness of the ABW-based image watermarking method image is evaluated based on the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Correlation coefficient values. From the implementation results, we came to know that this ABW-based image watermarking method can withstand many image manipulations compared to other existing methods.