An Indexed Approach for Expectation-Confirmation Theory: A Trust-based model

The present study utilised the Expectation-Confirmation Theory (ECT) as a theoretical framework to examine the temporal development of customer trust, satisfaction, and repurchase intent. In subsequent phases of the ECT, the significance of expectations in influencing customers’ attitudes towards confirmed trust and satisfaction was emphasised. The Trust-based Expectation-Confirmation model was therefore proposed to study trust at the appropriate level of abstraction to capture and analyse the relationships between Expected Trust, Perceived Trust, and the Confirmation of Expected Trust. The evaluation of the proposed ECT Trust-based model was conducted through a web-based survey with 559 participants, aiming to examine the direct and indirect approaches of measuring the Confirmation phase. Both approaches were found to be problematic in terms of the gap between the Perceived and Expected construct measured, which cannot be adjusted by the middle point on the Likert scale when using the direct approach either. This research article proposes the Indexed Approach as a new relevant assessment approach to transform data gathered from participants, which were measured throughout the Expectation and Perceived Performance stages, into a common format that could be used to determine each participant’s Confirmation. In order to validate the Indexed Approach, PLS path modelling evaluation and comparison for each approach were conducted; the results indicated that the Indexed Approach was the superior alternative to the direct and indirect approaches for transformation confirmation data to be used in the ECT model

Innovative Energy-Efficient Proxy Re-Encryption for Secure Data Exchange in Wireless Sensor Networks

In the realm of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), preserving data integrity, privacy, and security against cyberthreats is paramount. Proxy re-encryption (PRE) plays a pivotal role in ensuring secure intra-network communication. However, existing PRE solutions encounter persistent challenges, including processing delays due to the transfer of substantial data to the proxy for re-encryption and the computational intensity of asymmetric cryptography. This study introduces an innovative PRE scheme that is meticulously customized for WSNs to enhance the secure communication between nodes within the network and external data server. The proposed PRE scheme optimizes efficiency by integrating lightweight symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic techniques, thereby minimizing computational costs during PRE operations and conserving energy for resource-constrained nodes. In addition, the scheme incorporates sophisticated key management and digital certificates to ensure secure key generation and distribution, which in turn, facilitates seamless authentication and scalable data sharing among the entities in WSN. This scheme maintains sensor-node data encryption and delegates secure re-encryption tasks exclusively to cluster heads, thereby reinforcing data privacy and integrity. Comprehensive evaluations of security, performance, and energy consumption validated the robustness of the scheme. The results confirm that the proposed PRE scheme significantly enhances the security, efficiency, and overall network lifetime of WSNs

A Novel Hybrid Prairie Dog Algorithm and Harris Hawks Algorithm for Resource Allocation of Wireless Networks

Enhancing the performance of wireless networks and communication systems requires careful resource allocation. Resource allocation optimization, however, is regarded as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which is NP-hard and non-convex. Due to the serious limitations of conventional procedures, solving such optimization problems requires specialized approaches. For instance, no optimal performance can be guaranteed using the heuristic algorithms; besides, the global optimization systems suffer from exponential computation complexity and considerable training duration. This paper introduces an improved version of the Prairie dog optimization (PDO) algorithm by the Harris Hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm. The developed technique, namely HPDO, relies on using the HHO operators to improve the exploitation capability of PDO during the searching procedure. The significance of the presented HPDO is examined and analyzed using 23 mathematical benchmark functions and CEC-2019 with several dimension sizes to show the ability to solve different numerical problems. In addition to the resource allocation problem, the HPDO is evaluated using three engineering problems: The spring design issue, The pressure vessel design issue, and the Welded beam design issue. The experimental and simulation results demonstrated that the exploration and exploitation search method of HPDO and its convergence rate had remarkably increased. The experimental results of the resource allocation of the wireless network with different numbers of users 10, 50, and 100 achieve superior results compared to other algorithms with 0.136, 2.75, and 3.64, respectively.The results showed the supremacy of the HPDO over the traditional HHO, PDO, and several with state-of-the-art algorithms