In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used to extend the Internet of things (IoT) framework owing to their vast applications, monitoring and surveillance capability, ubiquity, and mobility. To support IoT requirements, UAVs must be capable of aggregating, processing, and transmitting data in real-time basis. As not only the number of IoT devices but also the amount of data to be collected is increased, data aggregation is of great importance. Recently, the UAV can also function as a mobile edge computing server in association with aerial data aggregation. This paper is the first to survey the various aspects and techniques of UAV-based aerial data aggregation for IoT networks. After addressing key design issues, we review the existing data aggregation techniques along with possible future direction. They are then compared with each other in terms of major operational features, performance characteristics, advantages, and limitations. Open issues and research challenges are also discussed with possible solution approaches.

Runtime Verification can be defined as a collection of formal methods for studying the dynamic evaluation of execution traces against formal specifications. Aside from creating a monitor from specifications and building algorithms for the evaluation of the trace, the process of gathering events and making them available for the monitor and the communication between the system under analysis and the monitor are critical and important steps in the runtime verification process. In many situations and for a variety of reasons, the event trace could be incomplete or could contain imprecise events. When a missing or ambiguous event is detected, the monitor may be unable to deliver a sound verdict. In this survey, we review the literature dealing with the problem of monitoring with incomplete traces. We list the different causes of uncertainty that have been identified, and analyze their effect on the monitoring process. We identify and compare the different methods that have been proposed to perform monitoring on such traces, highlighting the advantages and drawbacks of each method.

Healthcare is of particular importance in everyone’s life, and keeping the advancement of it on a good pace is a priority of any country, as it highly influences the overall well-being of its citizens. Each government strives to build a modern, intelligent medical system that provides maximum population coverage with high-quality medical services. The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) significantly improves the accessibility and effectiveness of the healthcare system by forming the eHealth environment, thus, providing an opportunity to enhance the quality of patient care and significantly speed up the work of medical experts and reduce costs for medical services. Shifting medical services to digital and remote operations requires a lot of computational capabilities. Implementing new computing paradigms is prominent — remote services face new requirements due to the increasing data and demand for new computing solutions. Computing paradigms, e.g., Cloud, Edge, Mobile Edge Computing, besides others, are used to process the collected medical data, improving patient healthcare quality. This paper focuses on computing solutions for medical use cases by offering a comprehensive survey on standardization aspects, use cases, applicable computing paradigms, security limitations, and design considerations within the ICT usages for medical applications. Finally, it outlines the most critical integration challenges and solutions from the literature.

The Domain Name System (DNS) plays a crucial role in connecting services and users on the Internet. Since its first specification, DNS has been extended in numerous documents to keep it fit for today’s challenges and demands. And these challenges are many. Revelations of snooping on DNS traffic led to changes to guarantee confidentiality of DNS queries. Attacks to forge DNS traffic led to changes to shore up the integrity of the DNS. Finally, denial-of-service attack on DNS operations have led to new DNS operations architectures. All of these developments make DNS a highly interesting, but also highly challenging research topic. This tutorial – aimed at graduate students and early-career researchers – provides a overview of the modern DNS, its ongoing development and its open challenges. This tutorial has four major contributions. We first provide a comprehensive overview of the DNS protocol. Then, we explain how DNS is deployed in practice. This lays the foundation for the third contribution: a review of the biggest challenges the modern DNS faces today and how they can be addressed. These challenges are (i) protecting the confidentiality and (ii) guaranteeing the integrity of the information provided in the DNS, (iii) ensuring the availability of the DNS infrastructure, and (iv) detecting and preventing attacks that make use of the DNS. Last, we discuss which challenges remain open, pointing the reader towards new research areas.