Eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) is a fundamental yet time-consuming operation with extensive applications in Internet of Things (IoT). When the matrix dimension reaches millions, resource-limited IoT devices struggle to perform such computationally expensive operations. Edge computing, with its plentiful computing resources, offers an effective solution to this problem. However, privacy concerns arise because outsourced tasks may contain sensitive user data. In this article, we propose the first privacy-preserving, edge-assisted EVD outsourcing scheme that securely enables users to outsource EVD tasks to edge servers. We design a privacy-preserving matrix transformation method to encode the original data, ensuring that edge servers cannot access users’ private information. Additionally, we design a verification scheme that enables the user to verify the correctness of the results returned by the edge servers. Our protocol supports parallel computation by multiple edge servers, thus enhancing the efficiency of EVD. The feasibility of our proposed scheme is demonstrated through both theoretical and experimental perspectives.

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a widely applied foundational decomposition technique; however, its computational demands often exceed the capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While leveraging edge servers can alleviate this load, it may introduce potential security vulnerabilities. Current secure outsourcing computation methods designed for cloud environments are challenging to adapt to distributed schemes in edge computing. Our research proposes a novel secure edge-assisted protocol for IoT devices solving SVD, aiming to conceal the Input/Output matrix and balance computational loads across multiple edge servers. The protocol ensures the confidentiality of original matrices and decomposition results, preventing exposure to edge servers. We conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the protocol’s efficiency and security, substantiating its advancements through experiments.

$A$smart transportation system (i.e., intelligent transportation system) refers to a transportation critical infrastructure system that integrates advanced technologies (e.g., networking, distributed computing, big data analytics, etc.) to improve the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of the transportation system. However, the rapid increase in the number of vehicles on roads and significant fluctuations in the flow of traffic can cause the coverage holes of Road Side Units (RSUs) and local traffic overload in smart transportation systems, which can negatively affect the performance of systems and causes accidents. To address these issues, deploying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as mobile RSUs is a viable approach. Nonetheless, how to deploy UAVs to the optimal position in the smart transportation system remains an unsolved issue. This paper proposes a Vehicle Trajectory-based Dynamic UAV Deployment Algorithm (VTUDA). The VTUDA utilizes vehicle trajectory prediction information to improve the efficiency of UAV deployment. First, we deploy a distributed Seq2Seq-GRU model to the UAVs and train the model. We leverage the well-trained model to predict vehicle trajectory. VTUDA then uses the predicted information to make informed decisions on the optimal location to position the UAVs. Further-more, VTUDA considers both the condition of communication channels and energy consumption during the deployment process to ensure that UAVs are deployed to optimal positions. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed VTUDA can effectively improve the deployment of UAVs. The experimental results also demonstrate that VTUDA can significantly enhance vehicle access and communication quality between vehicles and UAVs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a huge number of IoT devices, including sensors, actuators, computing nodes, etc. Those IoT devices communicate with each other by using different communication techniques. Generally, LTE, 5G, and WiFi are involved in IoT to support communication. However, it needs considerable communication infrastructures to support wireless communication. An obvious issue is how to create a communication network in some regions that have less communication support. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a kind of wireless ad hoc network, which organizes a huge number of wireless sensors to create a self-organized wireless network. Therefore, the WSN is a potential approach to providing communication in those regions. Since WSN is highly dynamic, how to create the wireless network to provide optimal coverage rate is still open. In this article, we propose a dynamic wireless sensor deployment scenarios that provide optimal coverage rate in a certain region. Our model proposes a coverage rate based on possible disaster scenarios for communication between Base Stations and UAVs. We optimize the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and find the maximum coverage rate.

Along with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a massive number of IoT devices are connected to the Internet. Smartphones as typical IoT devices which collect valuable and important data from users. Based on data analysis, smartphones can provide valuable services to users, such as intelligent recommendations, location-based introductions, etc. Since smartphones are connected to the Internet, it increases the risks of attacks from adversaries. Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems, the number of attacks targets Android systems increase significantly. However, there are some limitations of malware detection applications for Android systems, for example, it cannot identify new malware that was not signed by the malware database. In addition, it has a low detection rate in the dynamic detection process since the malware hides malicious activities. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new malware detection scheme for Android systems. In this study, we propose a Cross Inspection Framework (CIF) to detect malware on Android systems. CIF enables both static and dynamic detections and the evaluation shows the proposed CIF has better performance than only executing static or dynamic detection on Android systems.

The Internet of Things (IoT) encompasses a near-incalculable collection of dispersed and embedded computing devices acting as sensors and actuators, generating data at an incredible scale. However, a lack of coherency and cross-compatibility in IoT deployments has lead to increasing redundancy and waste of resources. To combat this, various concepts have been proposed for an open IoT search engine (IoT-SE) that serves human and machine users. Invariably, the IoT-SE envisions distributed query retrieval to handle massive volumes of devices and data. Incorporating the massively heterogeneous protocols and properties of devices deployed, the search of such a system for timely and pertinent data is massively challenging, to provide useful knowledge and service for IoT systems. Moreover, enabling and maintaining security and privacy in an IoT-SE is likewise a prodigious task, as end users, IoT devices, and the search system itself, have different protocols and requirements. To this end, a study of security issues in IoT search is conducted to outline the challenges ahead, and a case study to resolve practical security vulnerabilities in an IoT-SE system is carried out. The pertinent issues of security in an IoT-SE system are reviewed. Particularly: 1) a taxonomy is detailed for IoT-SE security issues; 2) the vulnerabilities of machine learning (ML) models in the IoT-SE are considered; and 3) defensive mechanisms are presented for securing IoT Search. A case study is carried out to implement basic security features in the IoT search, addressing the risk of false queries through the design of ML-based solutions. Finally, a roadmap for future research is provided, including the security and privacy for IoT systems connected to the IoT-SE, distributed edge computing in IoT-SE, privacy-preserving data markets in IoT-SE, and distributed ML in IoT-SE.

With the increasing adoption of Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) devices, infrastructures, and supporting applications, it is critical to design schemes to effectively allocate resources (e.g., networking, computing, and energy) in IIoT systems, generally formalized as optimization problems. Nonetheless, because the system is highly complex, operation and networking graph-based environments are time varying, and required information may not be available, it is difficult to leverage traditional optimization techniques to solve the optimal resource allocation problem. In this article, we propose a deep$Q$-network (DQN)-based scheme to address both bandwidth utilization and energy efficiency in a networking graph-based IIoT system. In detail, we design a DQN model that consists of two deep neural networks (DNNs) and a$Q$-learning model. The DNN network abstracts the features from the highly dimensional inputs and obtains the approximate$Q$-function for the$Q$-learning model. Based on the$Q$-function, the$Q$-learning model can generate the$Q$-table and reward function. After the training process, the DQN model can select appropriate actions for the agents (i.e., robots in a smart warehouse in this study) to improve bandwidth utilization and energy efficiency. To evaluate our proposed scheme, we design a simulation environment to investigate a typical IIoT scenario: the actuation of robotics in a smart warehouse. We then implement the DQN model and conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our scheme. Our experimental results confirm that our scheme can improve both bandwidth utilization and energy efficiency, as compared to other representative schemes.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a critically important implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting IoT devices ubiquitously in an industrial environment. Based on the interconnection of IoT devices, IIoT applications can collect and analyze sensing data, which help operators to control and manage manufacturing systems, leading to significant performance improvements and enabling automation. IIoT systems are characterized by a variety of IIoT applications, which generate different computing tasks depending on their functionalities. Some tasks are time sensitive (TS), while others are not, and more importantly, some tasks are nonpreemptive in IIoT scenarios. Thus, processing the different IIoT applications efficiently in an IIoT environment is key to achieving automation. Since computing resources are limited in IIoT, how to rapidly process TS tasks is a critical issue. Although some existing scheduling schemes can deal with the latency requirements of TS tasks, they lack consideration for nonpreemptive tasks. To address this issue, in this article we consider a typical smart warehouse system as an example and propose a generic task scheduling scheme that reserves computing resources to wait for upcoming TS tasks in such an IIoT environment. In doing so, our proposed scheme is capable of minimizing the overall waiting time for TS tasks. To evaluate the proposed scheme, we have implemented a simulation platform for a smart warehouse and conducted extensive experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme, which can allocate computing resources so that the processing time for the TS tasks can be reduced. Additionally, we discuss some potential research directions toward improving performance in IIoT environments with respect to resource management, machine learning, and security and privacy.

Machine learning techniques have been widely adopted to assist in data analysis in a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. To enable flexible use of trained learning models, one viable solution is to leverage all categories of data from different applications to train a general model, which can be further tuned for applications through tuning process. This process incurs additional overhead at the start, but makes later revision and iteration faster and more flexible. Nonetheless, due to limited computing capabilities, IoT devices cannot handle the training process of large datasets. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a general framework to adopt transfer learning in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems. In our study, we categorize the application space of applying transfer learning to IIoT systems into four generic scenarios: centralized transfer learning with large datasets, distributed transfer learning with large datasets, centralized transfer learning with small datasets, and distributed transfer learning with small datasets. According to the characteristics of each scenario, we design workflows to apply transfer learning technique. To demonstrate the efficacy of the approach, we apply our transfer learning technique to the task of IIoT component recognition. We use the known VGG-16 model and leverage T-Less industrial datasets to evaluate the performance of our approach in different scenarios. Via performance evaluation, our experimental results confirm the efficacy of our approach, which can not only reduce training time, but also achieve higher accuracy, compared with the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) approach.

As a typical application of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial IoT (IIoT) connects all the related IoT sensing and actuating devices ubiquitously so that the monitoring and control of numerous industrial systems can be realized. Deep learning, as one viable way to carry out big-data-driven modeling and analysis, could be integrated in IIoT systems to aid the automation and intelligence of IIoT systems. As deep learning requires large computation power, it is commonly deployed in cloud servers. Thus, the data collected by IoT devices must be transmitted to the cloud for training process, contributing to network congestion and affecting the IoT network performance as well as the supported applications. To address this issue, in this article, we leverage the fog/edge computing paradigm and propose an edge computing-based deep learning model, which utilizes edge computing to migrate the deep learning process from cloud servers to edge nodes, reducing data transmission demands in the IIoT network and mitigating network congestion. Since edge nodes have limited computation ability compared to servers, we design a mechanism to optimize the deep learning model so that its requirements for computational power can be reduced. To evaluate our proposed solution, we design a testbed implemented in the Google cloud and deploy the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) model, utilizing a real-world IIoT data set to evaluate our approach.1Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach, which cannot only reduce the network traffic overhead for IIoT but also maintain the classification accuracy in comparison with several baseline schemes.1Certain commercial equipment, instruments, or materials are identified in this article in order to specify the experimental procedure adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor is it intended to imply that the materials or equipment identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

Deep learning, as an increasingly powerful and popular data analysis tool, has the potential to improve smart grid operation. One critical issue is that the accuracy of deep learning relies heavily on the integrity of the training dataset, and the data collection process is time-consuming and complex, resulting in that the applying deep learning may not satisfy the needs of time-sensitive applications. Moreover, in the smart grid, predictions must be timely, and cannot wait for the initial dataset to be completely collected by the sensors. Also, the traditional centralized data analytics structure requires the entire dataset to be uploaded to the cloud datacenter for analysis, which incurs significant network resource and increases network congestion. To address these problems, in this paper we consider the allocation of deep learning at the network edge and directly in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and design an online learning approach to enable small data subset training and continuous model updating to ensure accuracy requirements in time-sensitive environments. In our online learning approach, we implement the Just Another Network model, an optimized Long-Short Term Memory neural network model, to reduce the computation overhead for the deep learning training process. We evaluate our approach using real-world smart grid dataset. Our experimental results show that our online learning approach significantly reduces the training time while satisfying the accuracy requirements.