Ismaeel Al Ridhawi

Moayad Aloqaily, Ouns Bouachir, Fakhri Karray et al.

The advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to technological advancements in a plethora of domains. Healthcare, education, and smart city services are now enriched with AI capabilities. These technological advancements would not have been realized without the assistance of fast, secure, and fault-tolerant communication media. Traditional processing, communication and storage technologies cannot maintain high levels of scalability and user experience for immersive services. The metaverse is an immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual world that integrates fantasy and reality into a virtual environment using advanced virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices. Such an environment is still being developed and requires extensive research in order for it to be realized to its highest attainable levels. In this article, we discuss some of the key issues required in order to attain realization of metaverse services. We propose a framework that integrates digital twin (DT) with other advanced technologies such as the sixth generation (6G) communication network, blockchain, and AI, to maintain continuous end-to-end metaverse services. This article also outlines requirements for an integrated, DT-enabled metaverse framework and provides a look ahead into the evolving topic.

Safa Otoum, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Hussein T. Mouftah

The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in late 2019, has revealed that the use of computing and communication technologies provides significant aid in preventing, controlling, and combating infectious diseases. With the ongoing research in next-generation networking (NGN), the use of secure and reliable communication and networking is of utmost importance when dealing with users' health records and other sensitive information. Through the adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled NGN, the shape of healthcare systems can be altered to achieve smart and secure healthcare capable of coping with epidemics that may emerge at any given moment. In this article, we envision a cooperative and distributed healthcare framework that relies on state-of-the-art computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities, namely, Federated Learning (FL), mobile edge computing (MEC), and Blockchain, to enable epidemic (or suspicious infectious disease) discovery, remote monitoring, and fast health-authority response. The introduced framework can also enable secure medical data exchange at the edge and between different health entities. Such a technique, coupled with the low latency and high bandwidth functionality of 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass surveillance, monitoring and analysis to occur at the edge. Challenges, issues, and design guidelines are also discussed in this article with highlights on some trending solutions.