The advent of 5G has sparked interest in Wi-Fi offloading techniques that enable efficient resource sharing and congestion management of wireless communication spectrum. However, offloading data between multiple networks (i.e. service providers) requires costly inter-provider communication which has a substantial overhead as well as high offloading latency. Moreover, involvement of the profit-oriented decision making of service providers has an inherent weakness of unfair scheduling among users and networks. To overcome those problems, this research work proposes a holistic framework similar to an online data market place where existing infrastructure can be used to set up Wi-Fi zones that everyone can use from their own data plan irrespective of the network operators they belong to. First, our proposed architecture improves the efficacy of offloading by using decentralized nature of the emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to set up an operator-assisted data offloading platform, resulting in efficient inter-provider communication. Second, our proposal strengthens the fair scheduling of offloading resources by using blockchain technology to initiate unbiased and independent decision making. The resulting service is a rating system for the sellers to make reliable transactions for payments.

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This paper proposes "An Emergency Situation Detection System for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)", to support elderly people and patients with chronic conditions and potential health-related emergencies to live independently. It implements an Internet of Things (IoT) network that continuously monitors the health conditions of these people. The network includes mobile phones, to transmit the data generated by the IoT sensors to the cloud server. Especially, the paper proposes the 3 rd party unknown mobile relays instead of dedicated gateways as opposed to many existing solutions for IoT healthcare applications. The wireless communication technology used to provide the connectivity between the sensor nodes and mobile relays is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). To establish a secure end-to-end connectivity between low power IoT sensor nodes and cloud servers, the paper proposes several techniques. After the medical data transmission to the cloud server, it is responsible for emergency detection and alert generation accordingly. The type of emergency is not limited to a specific health issue, but new emergency situations can be defined and added to the proposed system. Ultimately, the interested parties such as family members, caretakers and doctors receive these alerts. The development of a prototype of the system as a part of the work using commercial off-the-shelf devices verifies the validity of the proposing system and evaluates the performance advantage over the existing systems.

Typical wearable devices use a dedicated mobile phone as relay node to transfer the collected sensor data to a server. However, such relay nodes can be faulty or inactive due to various reasons, leading to interruptions of the communication link. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a novel security-enhanced emergency situation detection system, where 3 rd party unknown mobile relays are used instead of dedicated gateways as opposed to many existing solutions for IoT healthcare applications. The proposed underlying key agreement and authentication scheme ensures anonymity and untraceability for both sensors (wearable devices) and relay nodes, and relies on symmetric key-based operations to function under resourceconstrained environments. We have also developed a prototype of the system using commercial off-the-shelf devices to verify the proposed method's validity and evaluate the performance advantage over existing approaches. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication technology is used to connect sensor nodes (wearable devices) and mobile relays. After sending medical data to the cloud server, the relay node is responsible for emergency detection and alert generation.

Optimal use of scarce radio spectrum is essential in the proliferation of beyond 5G networks, and promising blockchain technology offers various benefits for the spectrum management. However, existing blockchain-based solutions are expensive, non-optimized, and lack spectrum fraud detection. This paper proposes a novel consensus mechanism for a blockchain-based Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) system. The proposed "Proof-of-Sense" consensus mechanism operates based on spectrum sensing procedures rather than cryptographic calculations. It is specially designed to address fraudulent/unauthorized access to the spectrum by analyzing the sensed spectrum data. The core of the consensus mechanism is a cryptographic key sharing mechanism inspired by Shamir's secret sharing scheme. Moreover, the proposed DSA system can enable different micro-services such as automated spectrum auctions, payment and penalty handling, and spectrum fraud detection. A proof-of-concept based on experimental approaches coupled with Matlab simulations is presented to analyze the performance of the proposed consensus mechanism.

Vehicle tracking and surveillance is an area which is having a considerable attention in the context of security and safety. The detection and tacking of moving vehicles through multiple cameras is considered as a method of vehicle surveillance. This work addresses a problem of detecting and matching vehicles through multiple cameras. The power of GPUs are used to increase the number of video streams which can be processed using a single computer. In the detection process the Gabor filter is used as a directional filter and the SURF is used by the matcher to uniquely represent the vehicle.

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