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This paper provides the complete details of current challenges and solutions in the cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the context of the IIoT and its integration with edge computing (IIoT–edge computing). We systematically collected and analyzed the relevant literature from the past five years, applying a rigorous methodology to identify key sources. Our study highlights the prevalent IIoT layer attacks, common intrusion methods, and critical threats facing IIoT–edge computing environments. Additionally, we examine various types of cyberattacks targeting CPS, outlining their significant impact on industrial operations. A detailed taxonomy of primary security mechanisms for CPS within IIoT–edge computing is developed, followed by a comparative analysis of our approach against existing research. The findings underscore the widespread vulnerabilities across the IIoT architecture, particularly in relation to DoS, ransomware, malware, and MITM attacks. The review emphasizes the integration of advanced security technologies, including machine learning (ML), federated learning (FL), blockchain, blockchain–ML, deep learning (DL), encryption, cryptography, IT/OT convergence, and digital twins, as essential for enhancing the security and real-time data protection of CPS in IIoT–edge computing. Finally, the paper outlines potential future research directions aimed at advancing cybersecurity in this rapidly evolving domain.

With the development of wireless technology, users not only have wireless access to the Internet, but this has also sparked the emergence of Wireless Ad-hoc Networks (WANETs); this promising networking paradigm has the potential to adopt the shape of new emergent networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However, channel contention (CC) is one of the key reasons why the TCP performs poorly in WANETs. This paper presents a mechanism called Cross-layer Solution for Contention Control (CSCC) to enhance TCP performance in WANETs. Each node starts marking packets in the proposed mechanism when its CC level reaches a certain threshold. As a result, the source node adjusts the congestion window (cwnd) size to a good state to control the insertion ratio of packets into the network. To provide a fair share to each flow, the flow having a large cwnd is penalized more. Numerous simulations have been conducted across several topologies to clarify the performance of the suggested mechanism. The simulation findings show that, in the presence of the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocols, the proposed CSCC mechanism outperformed TCP NewReno in terms of throughput and fairness. In comparison to TCP NewReno, the suggested mechanism has fewer retransmitted packets.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is an intelligent searching technique for solving complicated and multimodal design optimization’s problems. The classical PSO algorithm is more flexible and efficient because of its ability to solve a diverse range of complex and real-world issues. Moreover, the primary deficiency of this method that it trapped and stuck to local minima during the optimization of multimodal, complex and inverse objective function. We introduce a crossover and mutation vectors in the conventional PSO to solve this deficiency. The differential evolution strategies inspired the novel vectors. The central idea of the proposal is that, the novel global best particle is updated through a mutation vector and crossover vector. The introduction of the global best particle maintains the swarm diversity at the final steps of the evolution process. Also, we designed a novel strategy for the control parameter, which will maintain a decent alignment of the candidates between the global and local searches. The performance evaluation table and trajectory curves illustrate that our proposed approach is the best compared to other methods.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are essential in many areas, from healthcare to environmental monitoring. However, WSNs are vulnerable to routing attacks that might jeopardize network performance and data integrity due to their inherent vulnerabilities. This work suggests a unique method for enhancing WSN security through the detection of routing threats using feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs). The proposed solution makes use of ANNs’ learning capabilities to model the network’s dynamic behavior and recognize routing attacks like black-hole, gray-hole, and wormhole attacks. CICIDS2017 is a heterogeneous dataset that was used to train and test the proposed system in order to guarantee its robustness and adaptability. The system’s ability to recognize both known and novel attack patterns enhances its efficacy in real-world deployment. Experimental assessments using an NS2 simulator show how well the proposed method works to improve routing protocol security. The proposed system’s performance was assessed using a confusion matrix. The simulation and analysis demonstrated how much better the proposed system performs compared to the existing methods for routing attack detection. With an average detection rate of 99.21% and a high accuracy of 99.49%, the proposed system minimizes the rate of false positives. The study advances secure communication in WSNs and provides a reliable means of protecting sensitive data in resource-constrained settings.

The citation intent extraction and classification has long been studied as it is a good measure of relevancy. Different approaches have classified the citations into different classes; including weak and strong, positive and negative, important and unimportant. Others have gone further from binary classification to multi-classes, including extension, use, background, or comparison. Researchers have utilized various elements of the information, including both meta and contents of the paper. The actual context of any referred article lies within the citation context where a paper is referred. Various attempts have been made to study the citation context to capture the citation intent, but very few have encoded the words to their contextual representations. For automated classification, we need to train deep learning models, which take the citation context as input and provides the reason for citing a paper. Deep neural models work on numeric data, and therefore, we must convert the text information to its numeric representation. Natural languages are much complex than computer languages. Computer languages have a pre-defined fixed syntax where each word has a unique meaning. In contrast, every word in natural language may have a different meaning and may well be understood by understanding the position, previous discussion, and neighboring words. The extra information provides the context of a word within a sentence. We have, therefore, used contextual word representation, which is trained through deep neural networks. Deep models require massive data for generalizing the model, however, the existing state-of-the-art datasets don’t provide much information for the training models to get generalized. Therefore, we have developed our own scholarly dataset, Citation Context Dataset with Intent (C2D-I), an extension of the C2D dataset. We used a transformers based model for capturing the contextual representation of words. Our proposed method outperformed the existing benchmark methods with F1 score of 89%.

Citation analysis is an active area of research for various reasons. So far, statistical approaches are mainly used for citation analysis, which does not look into the internal context of the citations. Deep analysis of citation may reveal interesting findings by utilizing deep neural network algorithms. The existing scholarly datasets are best suited for statistical approaches but lack citation context, intent, and section information. Furthermore, the datasets are too small to be used with deep learning approaches. For citation intent analysis, the datasets must have a citation context labeled with different citation intent classes. Most of the datasets either do not have labeled context sentences, or the sample is too small to be generalized. In this study, we critically investigated the available datasets for citation intent and proposed an automated citation intent technique to label the citation context with citation intent. Furthermore, we annotated ten million citation contexts with citation intent from Citation Context Dataset (C2D) dataset with the help of our proposed method. We applied Global Vectors (GloVe), Infersent, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) word embedding methods and compared their Precision, Recall, and F1 measures. It was found that BERT embedding performs significantly better, having an 89% Precision score. The labeled dataset, which is freely available for research purposes, will enhance the study of citation context analysis. Finally, It can be used as a benchmark dataset for finding the citation motivation and function from in-text citations.

Objective: To determine the etiology of tooth extraction in the Patients reporting to Armed Forces Institute of Dentistry. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department, Armed Forces Institute of Dentistry (AFID), Rawalpindi, from Jun 2015 to Sep 2015. Methodology: A total number of 10131 patients reported at the diagnostic department of Armed Forces Institute of Dentistry (AFID) for treatment. Out of them 1769 patients were referred to Oral and Maxillofacial surgery department for tooth extraction. Twenty doctors consulted these patients, three of them classified Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon and the rest of the 17 were postgraduate residents. The patients were divided into three age groups; below 30 years of age, between 30 and 60 years of age and above 60 years of age. The reasons for exodontia were assigned to nine groups. Results: A total of 2, 167 teeth were extracted in 1, 769 patients (1.23 ± 0.07 teeth per patient), ranging in age from 4 years to 76 years. Overall, dental caries and its sequelae were the most frequent reason for tooth extraction (62.7%), followed by periodontal disease (22.6%). Males were 70.5% and females formed 29.5% of the patients. Conclusion: Our study indicates that tooth extraction is still very commonly practiced in our society. Dental caries and its sequelae is the leading cause of tooth loss reflecting poor oral hygiene standards and practices adopted by our population.

The medical and healthcare domains require automatic diagnosis systems (ADS) for the identification of health problems with technological advancements. Biomedical imaging is one of the techniques used in computer-aided diagnosis systems. Ophthalmologists examine fundus images (FI) to detect and classify stages of diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR is a chronic disease that appears in patients with long-term diabetes. Unattained patients can lead to severe conditions of DR, such as retinal eye detachments. Therefore, early detection and classification of DR are crucial to ward off advanced stages of DR and preserve the vision. Data diversity in an ensemble model refers to the use of multiple models trained on different subsets of data to improve the ensemble’s overall performance. In the context of an ensemble model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for diabetic retinopathy, this could involve training multiple CNNs on various subsets of retinal images, including images from different patients or those captured using distinct imaging techniques. By combining the predictions of these multiple models, the ensemble model can potentially make more accurate predictions than a single prediction. In this paper, an ensemble model (EM) of three CNN models is proposed for limited and imbalanced DR data using data diversity. Detecting the Class 1 stage of DR is important to control this fatal disease in time. CNN-based EM is incorporated to classify the five classes of DR while giving attention to the early stage, i.e., Class 1. Furthermore, data diversity is created by applying various augmentation and generation techniques with affine transformation. Compared to the single model and other existing work, the proposed EM has achieved better multi-class classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity of 91.06%, 91.00%, 95.01%, and 98.38%, respectively.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) can be seen as integrating the social networking concept into the Internet of Things (IoT). Such networks enable different devices to form social relationships among themselves depending on pre-programmed rules and the preferences of their owners. When SIoT devices encounter one another on the spur of the moment, they seek out each other’s assistance. The connectivity of such smart objects reveals new horizons for innovative applications empowering objects with cognizance. This enables smart objects to socialize with each other based on mutual interests and social aspects. Trust building in social networks has provided a new perspective for providing services to providers based on relationships like human ones. However, the connected IoT nodes in the community may show a lack of interest in forwarding packets in the network communication to save their resources, such as battery, energy, bandwidth, and memory. This act of selfishness can highly degrade the performance of the network. To enhance the cooperation among nodes in the network a novel technique is needed to improve the performance of the network. In this article, we address the issue of the selfishness of the nodes through the formation of a credible community based on honesty. A social process is used to form communities and select heads in these communities. The selected community heads having social attributes prove effective in determining the social behavior of the nodes as honest or selfish. Unlike other schemes, the dishonest nodes are isolated in a separate domain, and they are given several chances to rejoin the community after increasing their honesty levels. The proposed social technique was simulated using MATLAB and compared with existing schemes to show its effectiveness. Our proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques in terms of throughput, overhead, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and packet-delivery latency.

The regular frequent pattern mining (RFPM) approaches are aimed to discover the itemsets with significant frequency and regular occurrence behavior in a dataset. However, these approaches mainly suffer from the following two issues: (1) setting the frequency threshold parameter for the discovery of regular frequent patterns technique is not an easy task because of its dependency on the characteristics of a dataset, and (2) RFPM approaches are designed to mine patterns from the static datasets and are not able to mine dynamic datasets. This paper aims to solve these two issues by proposing a novel top-K identical frequent regular patterns mining (TKIFRPM) approach to function on online datasets. The TKIFRPM maintains a novel synopsis data structure with item support index tables (ISI-tables) to keep summarized information about online committed transactions and dataset updates. The mining operation can discover top-K regular frequent patterns from online data stored in the ISI-tables. The TKIFRPM explores the search space in recursive depth-first order and applies a novel progressive node’s sub-tree pruning strategy to rapidly eliminate a complete infrequent sub-tree from the search space. The TKIFRPM is compared with the MTKPP approach, and it found that it outperforms its counterpart in terms of runtime and memory usage to produce designated topmost-K frequent regular pattern mining on the datasets following incremental updates.

Terminalia arjuna possesses significant cardioprotective, antidiabetic and antioxidant properties as these properties are described in Ayurveda. In the present study, three flavonoids were isolated through the separation and chromatographic purification of the whole plant material of T. arjuna. Spectroscopic characterization identified one of them as a new flavonoid “Terminalone A (1)” and two known flavonoids i.e., 6-hydroxy-2-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-7-methoxy-4H-chromen-4-one (2) and 2-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-5,7-dihydroxy-4H-chromen-4-one (3). The bioactivity studies showed considerable antibacterial and antioxidant (DPPH radical scavenging) potential for all the three compounds 1–3 where the compound 1 showed strong antibacterial and antioxidant activity.

Internet of Things (IoT)-backed smart shopping carts are generating an extensive amount of data in shopping markets around the world. This data can be cleaned and utilized for setting business goals and strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are used to efficiently extract meaningful patterns or insights from such huge amounts of data or big data. One such technique is Association Rule Mining (ARM) which is used to extract strategic information from the data. The crucial step in ARM is Frequent Itemsets Mining (FIM) followed by association rule generation. The FIM process starts by tuning the support threshold parameter from the user to produce the number of required frequent patterns. To perform the FIM process, the user applies hit and trial methods to rerun the aforesaid routine in order to receive the required number of patterns. The research community has shifted its focus towards the development of top-K most frequent patterns not using the support threshold parameter tuned by the user. Top-K most frequent patterns mining is considered a harder task than user-tuned support-threshold-based FIM. One of the reasons why top-K most frequent patterns mining techniques are computationally intensive is the fact that they produce a large number of candidate itemsets. These methods also do not use any explicit pruning mechanism apart from the internally auto-maintained support threshold parameter. Therefore, we propose an efficient TKIFIs Miner algorithm that uses depth-first search strategy for top-K identical frequent patterns mining. The TKIFIs Miner uses specialized one- and two-itemsets-based pruning techniques for topmost patterns mining. Comparative analysis is performed on special benchmark datasets, for example, Retail with 16,469 items, T40I10D100K and T10I4D100K with 1000 items each, etc. The evaluation results have proven that the TKIFIs Miner is at the top of the line, compared to recently available topmost patterns mining methods not using the support threshold parameter.

The seamless operation of inter-connected smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires consistently available end-to-end routes. However, the sensor nodes that rely on a very limited power source tend to cause disconnection in multi-hop routes due to power shortages in the WSNs, which eventually results in the inefficiency of the overall IoT network. In addition, the density of the available sensor nodes affects the existence of feasible routes and the level of path multiplicity in the WSNs. Therefore, an efficient routing mechanism is expected to extend the lifetime of the WSNs by adaptively selecting the best routes for the data transfer between interconnected IoT devices. In this work, we propose a novel routing mechanism to balance the energy consumption among all the nodes and elongate the WSN lifetime, which introduces a score value assigned to each node along a path as the combination of evaluation metrics. Specifically, the scoring scheme considers the information of the node density at a certain area and the node energy levels in order to represent the importance of individual nodes in the routes. Furthermore, our routing mechanism allows for incorporating non-cooperative nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed work gives comparatively better results than some other experimented protocols.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are low-cost, special-purpose networks introduced to resolve various daily life domestic, industrial, and strategic problems. These networks are deployed in such places where the repairments, in most cases, become difficult. The nodes in WSNs, due to their vulnerable nature, are always prone to various potential threats. The deployed environment of WSNs is noncentral, unattended, and administrativeless; therefore, malicious attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can easily be commenced by the attackers. Most of the DDoS detection systems rely on the analysis of the flow of traffic, ultimately with a conclusion that high traffic may be due to the DDoS attack. On the other hand, legitimate users may produce a larger amount of traffic known, as the flash crowd (FC). Both DDOS and FC are considered abnormal traffic in communication networks. The detection of such abnormal traffic and then separation of DDoS attacks from FC is also a focused challenge. This paper introduces a novel mechanism based on a Bayesian model to detect abnormal data traffic and discriminate DDoS attacks from FC in it. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, compared with the existing systems.

Selfish or non-cooperative behavior of nodes can degrade the performance of a wireless sensor network in many ways. These nodes can cause increased end-to-end delays and unfair energy consumption among the nodes due to higher packet loss ratio and non-utilization of optimal routes. Various nodes' stimulation techniques have been proposed. Credit-based incentives with game theoretic approaches are said to be more effective in such experiments. This paper introduces a game theoretic reward-based mechanism to balance the work load among network nodes by stimulating them to equally cooperate in data forwarding toward the base station. Various possible parameters associated with a network and its nodes are considered. In addition, a card-based punishment system is introduced, which is rationally applied on the nodes according to their individual importance in the network. A new technique for finding nodes' individual importance in the network is designed for better manipulation of nodes.

The objective of the research is to extend the potential of the standard quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) method for electromagnetic inverse problems. As, QPSO trapped into local optima while dealing with complex design problems. In order to address this type of issue, to avoid from trapping into local optima and tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation searches, a novel methodology is employed which includes the design of a new position updating formula, the introduction of a novel fitness selection methodology, and the proposal of a dynamic parameter updating strategy. Nevertheless, the evaluated results as reported have revealed that the proposed modified quantum-inspired particle swarm optimization method for global optimization and electromagnetic inverse problems can find better outcomes at initial stage of the iterating process as compared with other tested optimal methods.

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a member of the swarm intelligence-based on a metaheuristic approach which is inspired by the natural deeds of bird flocking and fish schooling. In comparison to other traditional methods, the model of PSO is widely recognized as a simple algorithm and easy to implement. However, the traditional PSO’s have two primary issues: premature convergence and loss of diversity. These problems arise at the latter stages of the evolution process when dealing with high-dimensional, complex and electromagnetic inverse problems. To address these types of issues in the PSO approach, we proposed an Improved PSO (IPSO) which employs a dynamic control parameter as well as an adaptive mutation mechanism. The main proposal of the novel adaptive mutation operator is to prevent the diversity loss of the optimization process while the dynamic factor comprises the balance between exploration and exploitation in the search domain. The experimental outcomes achieved by solving complicated and extremely high-dimensional optimization problems were also validated on superconducting magnetic energy storage devices (SMES). According to numerical and experimental analysis, the IPSO delivers a better optimal solution than the other solutions described, particularly in the early computational evaluation of the generation.

Electromagnetic design problems are generally formulated as nonlinear programming problems with multimodal objective functions and continuous variables. These can be solved by either a deterministic or a stochastic optimization algorithm. Recently, many intelligent optimization algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA) and artificial bee colony (ABC), have been proposed and applied to electromagnetic design problems with promising results. However, there is no universal algorithm which can be used to solve engineering design problems. In this paper, a stochastic smart quantum particle swarm optimization (SQPSO) algorithm is introduced. In the proposed SQPSO, to tackle the premature convergence problem in order to improve the global search ability, a smart particle and a memory archive are adopted instead of mutation operations. Moreover, to enhance the exploration searching ability, a new set of random numbers and control parameters are introduced. Experimental results validate that the adopted control policy in this work can achieve a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Finally, the SQPSO has been tested on well-known optimization benchmark functions and implemented on the electromagnetic TEAM workshop problem 22. The simulation result shows an outstanding capability of the proposed algorithm in speeding convergence compared to other algorithms.

Due to distributed nature, dynamic topology and resources constraints of tiny sensing nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the quality of service (QoS) support is a challenging issue. However, satisfying the stringent QoS requirements is an open problem. QoS aware protocols for WSNs have gained recently considerable attention of the researchers. In this paper, we focus on the QoS satisfaction in WSNs, basics of QoS support in WSNs, and more importantly challenge, requirements of QoS at each layer. Furthermore, we review the QoS protocols and categorize the QoS aware protocols and elaborate their pros and cons. We also discuss the QoS parameters with respect to each protocol performance parameters. A survey and comprehensive discussion on the QoS aware protocols of WSNs are presented, including their strengths and limitations. Finally, we also survey some computational intelligence (CI) techniques and find the basic requirements of such techniques. Moreover, we study these CI techniques in the light of QoS management and tabulate the level of each CI technique for QoS management. The paper is concluded with open research issues.

Internet of things (IoT) is a very important research area, having many applications such as smart cities, intelligent transportation system, tracing, and smart homes. The underlying technology for IoT are wireless sensor networks (WSN). The selection of cluster head (CH) is significant as a part of the WSN’s optimization in the context of energy consumption. In WSNs, the nodes operate on a very limited energy source, therefore, the routing protocols designed must meet the optimal utilization of energy consumption in such networks. Evolutionary games can be designed to meet this aspect by providing an adequately efficient CH selection mechanism. In such types of mechanisms, the network nodes are considered intelligent and independent to select their own strategies. However, the existing mechanisms do not consider a combination of many possible parameters associated with the smart nodes in WSNs, such as remaining energy, selfishness, hop-level, density, and degree of connectivity. In our work, we designed an evolutionary game-based approach for CH selection, combined with some vital parameters associated with sensor nodes and the entire networks. The nodes are assumed to be smart, therefore, the aspect of being selfish is also addressed in this work. The simulation results indicate that our work performs much better than typical evolutionary game-based approaches.

The next generation surveillance and multimedia systems will become increasingly deployed as wireless sensor networks in order to monitor parks, public places and for business usage. The convergence of data and telecommunication over IP-based networks has paved the way for wireless networks. Functions are becoming more intertwined by the compelling force of innovation and technology. For example, many closed-circuit TV premises surveillance systems now rely on transmitting their images and data over IP networks instead of standalone video circuits. These systems will increase their reliability in the future on wireless networks and on IEEE 802.11 networks. However, due to limited non-overlapping channels, delay, and congestion there will be problems at sink nodes. In this paper we provide necessary conditions to verify the feasibility of round robin technique in these networks at the sink nodes by using a technique to regulate multi-radio multichannel assignment. We demonstrate through simulations that dynamic channel assignment scheme using multi-radio, and multichannel configuration at a single sink node can perform close to optimal on the average while multiple sink node assignment also performs well. The methods proposed in this paper can be a valuable tool for network designers in planning network deployment and for optimizing different performance objectives.

Multi-channel assignments are becoming the solution of choice to improve performance in single radio for wireless networks. Multi-channel allows wireless networks to assign different channels to different nodes in real-time transmission. In this paper, we propose a new approach, Multi-channel Distributed Coordinated Function (MC-DCF) which takes advantage of multi-channel assignment. The backoff algorithm of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) was modified to invoke channel switching, based on threshold criteria in order to improve the overall throughput for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over 802.11 networks. We presented simulation experiments in order to investigate the characteristics of multi-channel communication in wireless sensor networks using an NS2 platform. Nodes only use a single radio and perform channel switching only after specified threshold is reached. Single radio can only work on one channel at any given time. All nodes initiate constant bit rate streams towards the receiving nodes. In this work, we studied the impact of non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 frequency band on: constant bit rate (CBR) streams, node density, source nodes sending data directly to sink and signal strength by varying distances between the sensor nodes and operating frequencies of the radios with different data rates. We showed that multi-channel enhancement using our proposed algorithm provides significant improvement in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio and delay. This technique can be considered for WSNs future use in 802.11 networks especially when the IEEE 802.11n becomes popular thereby may prevent the 802.15.4 network from operating effectively in the 2.4 GHz frequency band.

In last decade, there have been many research works about wireless sensor networks (WSNs) focused on improving the network performance as well as increasing the energy efficiency and communications effectiveness. Many of these new mechanisms have been implemented using the behaviors of certain animals, such as ants, bees, or schools of fish. These systems are called bioinspired systems and are used to improve aspects such as handling large-scale networks, provide dynamic nature, and avoid resource constraints, heterogeneity, unattended operation, or robustness, among many others. Therefore, this paper aims to study bioinspired mechanisms in the field of WSN, providing the concepts of these behavior patterns in which these new approaches are based. The paper will explain existing bioinspired systems in WSNs and analyze their impact on WSNs and their evolution. In addition, we will conduct a comprehensive review of recently proposed bioinspired systems, protocols, and mechanisms. Finally, this paper will try to analyze the applications of each bioinspired mechanism as a function of the imitated animal and the deployed application. Although this research area is considered an area with highly theoretical content, we intend to show the great impact that it is generating from the practical perspective.

Background: FNAC is considered as a reliable and inexpensive test for diagnosing lymphadenopathy cases with a high degree of accuracy. The objective of this study was to determine the cytomorphological pattern of superficial lymph node aspirates. Material & Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Pathology, Bannu Medical College, Bannu, Pakistan from October, 2012 to September, 2013. All patients with superficial lymphadenopathy were included in the study. Patients with a history of less than four weeks lymphadenopathy, having acute inflammatory process in the draining area or having lymphadenopathy due to known primary malignancy were excluded. The demographic variables were sex, age in years and age grouping. The research variables were site and cause of lymphadenopathy. Age grouping was; up to 15 years, 16-40 years and above 40 years. Results: Out of 235 cases, there were 110(46.80%) males and 125(53.20%) females. The mean age of the sample was 35.00±13.50 (05-70) years. The frequency of age group up to 15 years was 82(34.90%), of 16-40 years was 50(21.27%) and of above 40 years was 103(43.83%). Site of lymphadenopathy were; left cervical lymph nodes in 105 (44.68%), right cervical lymph nodes in 60(25.53%), bilateral cervical lymph nodes in 11(4.68%), axillary lymph nodes in 30(12.76%), and other sites were involved in 29(12.35%) cases. The most cause of lymphadenopathy was chronic granulomatous lymphadenitis in 110 (46.8%). Conclusion: Fine needle aspiration cytology is a good diagnostic tool in diagnosis of lymphadenopathy and will significantly enhance the institution of timely and appropriate treatment regimens.

A phytochemical investigation on the ethyl acetate soluble fraction of Lonicera quinquelocularis (whole plant) led to the first time isolation of one new phthalate; bis(7-acetoxy-2-ethyl-5-methylheptyl) phthalate (3) and two new benzoates; neopentyl-4-ethoxy-3, 5-bis (3-methyl-2-butenyl benzoate (4) and neopentyl-4-hydroxy-3, 5-bis (3-methyl-2-butenyl benzoate (5) along with two known compounds bis (2-ethylhexyl phthalate (1) and dioctyl phthalate (2). Their structures were established on the basis of spectroscopic analysis and by comparison with available data in the literature. All the compounds (1-5) were tested for their acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) inhibitory activities in dose dependent manner. The IC50 (50% inhibitory effect) values of compounds 3 and 5 against AChE were 1.65 and 3.43 µM while the values obtained against BChE were 5.98 and 9.84 µM respectively. Compounds 2 and 4 showed weak inhibition profile.

Energy efficiency is the main concern of research community while designing routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This concern can be addressed by using energy-harvesting scheme in routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a secure routing protocol that is based on cross layer design and energy-harvesting mechanism. It uses a distributed cluster-based security mechanism. In the cross-layer design, parameters are exchanged between different layers to ensure efficient use of energy. Energy-harvesting system is used to extract and store energy, which is used to take decisions for the node state and thus for the routing issues. Simulation results show that our routing protocol can perform better in many scenarios and in hostile attack-prone environment.