This Handbook provides the first comprehensive reference book in English about the development of mass and social media in all Arab countries. Capturing the historical as well as current developments in the media scene, this collection maps the role of media in social and political movements. Contributors include specialists in the field from North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Each chapter provides an overview of the history, regulatory frameworks and laws governing the press, and socio-political functions of the media. While the geopolitical complexities of the region have been reflected in the expert analyses collectively, the focus is always the local context of each member state. All 37 chapters consider the specific historical, political and media trajectories in each country, to provide a contextual background and foundation for further study about single states or comparative analysis in two or more Arab states. Capturing significant technological developments and the widespread use of social media, this all-inclusive volume on Arab media is a key resource for students and scholars interested in journalism, media and Middle East studies.

Introduction Frailty is an increasingly common condition in which physiological decline as a result of accumulated deficits renders older people more vulnerable to adverse outcomes. An increasing range of frailty screening programmes have been introduced in primary care to identify frail older people in order to deliver appropriate interventions. However, limited information on the knowledge and attitude of healthcare professionals (HCPs) with respect to frailty screening is known. The aim of this systematic review is to provide evidence on the knowledge and attitude of HCP in terms of frailty screening, and potentially identify barriers and facilitators to frailty screening to improve implementation of frailty screening in primary care. Methods/design A systematic review of qualitative research will be conducted. Databases searched will be MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, PsycINFO and Web of Science from January 2001 to August 2019. Methods will be reported based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. Population, interest, context and study design methodology was used to develop inclusion and exclusion criteria with HCPs as population, frailty screening as interest and knowledge or attitude of HCPs to frailty screening as context. Studies with a qualitative methodology or a mixed-method design where the qualitative component is analysed separately will also be included. Quality appraisal will be carried out using the Joanna Briggs Institute appraisal tool for qualitative studies. Data will be extracted from each selected study with thematic framework analysis used to synthesise findings. Ethics and dissemination This systematic review does not require ethical approval as primary data will not be collected. The findings will be disseminated at conferences and in a relevant academic journal. This review will assist HCPs and relevant stakeholders to tackle the challenges of frailty screening in primary care. PROSPERO registration number CRD42019159007.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has emerged as a unique implementation of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). These networks promise to increase road safety and improve the driving experience by exploiting recent advances in wireless technologies for both intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle communications. Physical layer security is a promising alternative approach to secure communication in VANETs where physical and applications' constraints encourage the use of lightweight and fast cryptographic algorithms. Our work focuses on the quantisation stage of the secret generation process, by reviewing existing schemes in the public domain and associated performance metrics. Evaluations are done through simulation with the aid of a wireless channel model which includes three-dimensional scattering and scatterers' mobility. Preliminary findings show that RSS-based algorithms do not perform efficiently in the proposed vehicular stochastic wireless model. Hence they are not able to satisfy the typical low latency required in safety-related broadcasting messaging. We conclude that more research is desirable to design protocols capable of taking advantage from the nodes' high-mobility and the consequent variability of both coherence intervals and level crossing rates, to further improve secret bit extraction throughput.

Majority of vehicular safety applications such as collision avoidance and blind spot warnings require a limited delay for a message to be transmitted from the abnormal vehicle to the endangered vehicles to avert the occurrence of the accident. This paper proposed a Timely and Efficient Multihop Broadcast (TEMB) Scheme, which combines an adaptive forwarding strategy that depends on the estimated transmission range between moving vehicles on the road. The scheme further combines ARQ with an adaptive Forward Error Correction system to minimise the number of retransmissions while ensuring the reliability of message delivery to the intended recipient. Modifications on the IEEE802.11p data and acknowledgement (feedback) frames are presented. The scheme has been evaluated and compared with the Fast Broadcast scheme, the results have shown that the TEMB scheme has outperformed the Fast Broadcast scheme for reliable and timely message delivery among the moving vehicles on the motorway.

The need of developing reliable industrial automation networks has increased to a great extent due to the transmission of hard real time control packets over error prone wireless channels. This paper focuses on error control approaches to satisfy strict reliability requirements of industrial automation control applications. In this paper, some of the state of art error control approaches are critically analysed and a novel adaptive error control approach ASM-HARQ is proposed. ASM-HARQ is an adaptive HARQ approach that uses both FEC and ARQ to recover the errors present in each encoding unit which is sub-MSDU. Simulation results show that ASM-HARQ outperforms other MAC layer error control approaches through its ability to satisfy reliability requirements even for time critical applications.

Industry 4.0 initiated the need of networking the factory automation, control and manufacturing facilities by forming industrial automation and control networks. These industrial networks transmit control packets with stringent security and reliability requirements. In this paper, a hybrid method is proposed to ensure secure and reliable transmission of the packets on these industrial automation and control networks. This method is based on hybrid cryptography and reliable properties are incorporated into it to ensure both secure and reliable delivery of the packets to the receiver. Evaluation of the proposed method is undertaken in this report based on the simulation studies.

It is envisioned that WAVE standard, the technology for future DSRC communication in vehicular environments will support vehicular communication networks in order to provide safety and infotainment services as part of ITS. However, the defined parameter set for the EDCA used in 802.11p is capable of prioritizing messages, and when number of vehicles sending AC3 increases, packet collision probability will undeniably increase significantly. Since transmission collisions can only be detected after a transmission if at all, high percentage of packet collision probability will lead to many dead channel access times with no useful data exchange. We proposed CODER scheme which uses network coding to increase packet content and mitigate the problem of high collision probability which is inherent in WAVE standard by minimizing contention. Results of the theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that CODER scheme has a performance gain over WAVE in terms of reduced collision rate.

In this research, we use prostate cancer as an example to describe the idea of using Internet of Things (IoT) technology as part of the care process for chronic diseases. IoT provides ways to monitor and collect critical risk elements data that relate to the causes and development of the disease and its comorbidities, on a real time basis over a long period of time by sensing and communication capacity. The risk models and their evidences are gathered from the literature, and they will be semantically described to support the knowledge to be used by other applications. The personal data collected by IoT devices combined with risk models will provide individual risk prediction. The prediction can be used by patients in self-managing their chronic disease, and also help medical professionals to take in-sight look into the progression of the disease for the individual patient, in order to prescribe the best suitable care plan and treatment.