The proliferation of novel infotainment services such as Virtual Reality(VR)-based services has fundamentally changed the existing mobile networks. These bandwidth-hungry services expanded at a tremendously rapid pace, thus, generating a burden of data traffic in the mobile networks. To cope with this issue, one can use Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) to bring the resource to the edge. By doing so, we can release the burden of the core network by taking the communication, computation, and caching resources nearby the end-users (UEs). Nevertheless, due to the vast adoption of VR-enabled devices, MEC resources might be insufficient in peak times or dense settings. To overcome these challenges, we propose a system model where the service provider (SP) might rent Unmanned Area Vehicles (UAVs) from UAV service providers (USPs) to serve as micro-based stations (UBSs) that expand the service area and improve the spectrum efficiency. In which, UAV can pre-cached certain sets of VR-based contents and serve UEs via air-to-ground (A2G) communication. Furthermore, future intelligent devices are capable of 5G and B5G communication interfaces, and thus, they can communicate with UAVs via A2G links. By doing so, we can significantly reduce a considerable amount of data traffic in mobile networks. In order to successfully enable such kinds of services, an attractive incentive mechanism is required. Therefore, we propose a contract theory-based incentive mechanism for UAV-assisted MEC in VR-based infotainment services, in which the MEC offers an amount reward to a UAV for serving as a UBS in a specific location for certain time slots. We then derive an optimal contract-based scheme with individual rationality and incentive compatibility conditions. The numerical findings show that our proposed approach outperforms the Linear Pricing (LP) technique and is close to the optimal solution in terms of social welfare. Additionally, our proposed scheme significantly enhanced the fairness of utility for UAVs in asymmetric information problems.

The proliferation of compute-intensive services in next-generation vehicular networks will impose an unprecedented computation demand to meet stringent latency and resource requirements. Vehicular edge or fog computing has been a widely adopted solution to enhance the computational capacity of vehicular networks; however, the computation requirements of these compute hungry applications will surpass the capabilities of such a solution. To address this challenge, the on-board resources of neighboring mobile vehicles can be utilized. However, such resource utilization requires an incentive mechanism to motivate privately owned neighboring vehicles to participate in sharing their resources. In this paper, we propose a contract theory-based incentive mechanism that maximizes the social welfare of the vehicular networks by motivating neighboring vehicles to participate in sharing their resources. The proposed approach enables the Road Side Units (RSUs) to provide appropriate rewards by offering a tailored contract to each resource sharing vehicle based on their contribution and unique characteristics. Moreover, we derive an optimal contract scheme for computational task offloading, taking into account the individual rationality and incentive-compatible constraints. Finally, we perform numerical evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. The proposed scheme achieves up to 28% higher computing resource utilization, 17.2% lower energy consumption per computing resource utilization, and 17.1% lesser energy consumption per task completed when compared to the linear pricing incentive baseline.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is witnessed to be an integral part of emerging augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR) applications. These applications require contents from the cloud, thus suffer from high latency that is not desirable. To address this issue, one can store the frequently requested content at the MEC server. However, MEC servers have limited computing capabilities. Additionally, there are significant variations in a number of requests from the MEC server. Therefore, we propose collaborative edge caching. Our collaborative edge caching will serve the end-users in collaboration to fully exploit the available caching resources at the network edge. We derive optimization scheme based on the alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMM). Finally, we perform numerical evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide an effective solution for improving the coverage, capacity, and the overall performance of terrestrial wireless cellular networks. In particular, UAV-assisted cellular networks can meet the stringent performance requirements of the fifth generation new radio (5G NR) applications. In this article, the problem of energy-efficient resource allocation in UAV-assisted cellular networks is studied under the reliability and latency constraints of 5G NR applications. The framework of ruin theory is employed to allow solar-powered UAVs to capture the dynamics of harvested and consumed energies. First, the surplus power of every UAV is modeled, and then it is used to compute the probability of ruin of the UAVs. The probability of ruin denotes the vulnerability of draining out the power of a UAV. Next, the probability of ruin is used for efficient user association with each UAV. Then, power allocation for 5G NR applications is performed to maximize the achievable network rate using the water-filling approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ruin-based scheme can enhance the flight duration up to 61% and the number of served users in a UAV flight by up to 58%, compared to a baseline SINR-based scheme.

Federated learning (FL) rests on the notion of training a global model in a decentralized manner. Under this setting, mobile devices perform computations on their local data before uploading the required updates to improve the global model. However, when the participating clients implement an uncoordinated computation strategy, the difficulty is to handle the communication efficiency (i.e., the number of communications per iteration) while exchanging the model parameters during aggregation. Therefore, a key challenge in FL is how users participate to build a high-quality global model with communication efficiency. We tackle this issue by formulating a utility maximization problem, and propose a novel crowdsourcing framework to leverage FL that considers the communication efficiency during parameters exchange. First, we show an incentive-based interaction between the crowdsourcing platform and the participating client's independent strategies for training a global learning model, where each side maximizes its own benefit. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to analyze such scenario and find the game's equilibria. Second, we formalize an admission control scheme for participating clients to ensure a level of local accuracy. Simulated results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed solution with up to 22% gain in the offered reward.

Recently, the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the wireless networks has gained attention to achieve a better quality of service (QoS) for the mobile nodes. This paper studies the use of UAV network to assist the terrestrial network to meet the QoS requirements of the mobile nodes. However, such cellular traffic offloading to the energy constrained UAVs is not trivial. Therefore, we propose a weighted power allocation scheme in the UAV assisted heterogeneous networks (UAV-HetNets) where both UAV and terrestrial networks are efficiently utilized to meet the QoS requirements of the mobile nodes. For that purpose, the weighted energy minimization problem is formulated under the QoS constraints of the mobile node. Simulation results are drawn to show the significance of the proposed energy efficient resource allocation scheme.

Long Term Evolution-UnUcensed (LTE-U) is a 5G enabling technology in which both LTE and Wi-Fi systems operate together using the same frequency spectrum. LTE can co-exist with Wi-Fi in both 2.5GHz and 5GHz bands for fully utilizing the spectrum. Aggregating these two technologies while implementing a fair allocation of resources among them is a challenge. Moreover, the LTE technology provides better spectral efficiency and is more bandwidth hungry, thus, it can consume more spectrum which is unfair for Wi-Fi systems. Therefore, appropriate spectrum management scheme is needed to be developed that can maintain the fairness among the two coexisting technologies. This paper proposes a ruin theory based redundant spectrum allocation to LTE-U users while providing sufficient fairness to Wi-Fi systems.