Recent developments in collection, computation and communication have expanded the way of data reporting in intelligent Internet of Things (IoT). However, diversity and complexity of data sources also impose new trust challenge in data collection process since untrust reporters tend to report false or even malicious data, which highlights the need to develop a novel methodology to solve such challenge. Thus, based on this domain, inspired by deterrence theory, this article proposes a blockchain-based trust system with assistant of drones to deter malicious data reporting in intelligent IoT. Specifically, to deter malicious data reporting, based on the blockchain technology, the data sensed by fully trusted drones is public published on blockchain showing participants the data standards, named as malicious deterrence scheme. This scheme provides a barrier for malicious reporters to arbitrarily publish false data to blockchain, since the false data can be easily detected while they cannot deny. Second, to further reduce malicious data reporting, a strict penalty mechanism is proposed to punish malicious reporters who have reported false data to blockchain to reduce the malicious data reporting in the following task through punishment. Third, note that the sensing of data standard generates additional costs, therefore, a drone flight route scheme based on a simper deep reinforcement learning with multihead attention mechanism (MA-DRL) is designed to reduce the flight distance for drones. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate efficiency of our proposed system in terms of reducing malicious data reporting in advance as well as reducing drone flight distance.

Contemporarily, the fast development of computing, communication, and storage technology has revolutionized the way that various data-based applications reach massive data from underlying sensor networks. However, such a process also raises two challenging but critical issues: 1) trustworthy and 2) privacy issue for data collectors. Therefore, this article proposes a novel system, which is designed over the distributed mobile-edge network to sufficiently exploit advantages of blockchain and differential privacy (DP) to collect trustworthy data and protect privacy for data collectors. First, to improve trustworthiness of data collections, a new consensus mechanism is proposed for blockchain-based data collection structure, which comprehensively incorporates trustworthy, collection contribution, and throughput together to prefer data collectors for the next block. Second, with the assistance of fully trusted devices, a verifiable trustworthy evaluation strategy is designed to accurately compute the trustworthiness for data collectors. Third, we enforce DP on the data stored in a global blockchain maintained by the cloud server to protect privacy for data collectors without influencing data availability. Finally, both theoretical analyses and experimental results prove that the proposed system comprehensively improves performance of data collections in distributed network without adding any additional cost for the cloud server, compared to other schemes.

Recently, rapid deployment on the fifth-generation (5G) networks has brought great opportunities for enabling data-intensive applications and brings an extending expectation on the developments of 6G. A basic requirement to develop 6G networks is to reach data with low latency, low cost, and high coverage in smart Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, this article proposes a novel machine learning-based approach to collect data from multiple sensor devices by cooperation between vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in IoT. First, a genetic algorithm is utilized to select vehicular collectors to collect massive data from sensor devices, which aims to maximize coverage ratio and to minimize employment cost. Second, we design a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based route policy to plan collection routes of UAVs with constrain energy, which simplifies the network model, accelerates training speeds, and realizes dynamic planning of flight paths. The optimal collection route of a UAV is a series of outputs based on the proposed DRL-based route policy. Finally, our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can comprehensively improve the coverage ratio of massive data collections and reduce collection costs in smart IoT for the future 6G networks.

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), as the integration of mobile vehicle and intelligent technology, has raised plenty of attentions. In VANETs, mobile smart vehicles can timely get information from surrounding environment, which brings great convenience for society. However, this highlights the need to improve data quality while protecting privacy for vehicular data provider. Thus, in this article, we propose an AI-based Trust-aware and Privacy-preserving System (ATPS) to preserve privacy for vehicular data providers while improving quality of data collections in VANETs. Our proposed ATPS system mainly consists of two schemes: 1) a Partial Ordering based Trust Management (POTM) scheme and 2) a Trajectory Privacy Preserving (TPP) scheme jointly designed by Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGAN) and differential privacy. The POTM scheme uses partial ordering relationship to accurately evaluate and manage trusts for vehicular data providers with the assistance of fully trusted drones, and selects the vehicles with top ranks to collect data. Then, TPP scheme skillfully incorporates WGAN and differential privacy to preserve trajectory privacy for vehicular data providers in VANETs, which also guarantees data availability by adding carefully designed noise to the original trajectory. Compared to existing scheme, extensive experiments conducted on the real-world datasets demonstrates efficiency of our ATPS in terms of improving the data quality by 45.76% to 52.57%, reducing the malicious vehicle participants by 15.48% to 16.95%, preserving privacy of vehicles, and guaranteeing data availability.

The large number of mobile-sensing vehicles traveling in cities offer a novel solution to the collection of vast amounts of multimedia data packets. When a vehicle passes through the data center (DC), the collected multimedia data packets will be transmitted to the DC. Due to the mobile characteristic of vehicular sensor networks, the main challenge lies in how to improve the multimedia data delivery ratio and balance the data packet collections. In this paper, in consideration of delay and delivery factors, a novel routing method is proposed to optimize multimedia data collections in mobile sensing vehicles (DDSVs). This method targets at balancing multimedia data collections, improving the delivery ratio of the multimedia data, and reducing the delay ratio in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In the DDSV scheme, two rules are designed for improving the collection of multimedia data in the IoT. These rules pertain to: 1) data and 2) vehicular priorities. First, different regions hold different priorities of data packet transmission, which can improve the delivery ratio in the suburban areas and reduce the delay ratio. Meanwhile, this scheme is capable of guaranteeing the balance of multimedia data collection. Second, the vehicular priority is proportional to the probability of a vehicle reaching a DC. Therefore, the data should be forwarded to vehicles with higher priorities, that is, the vehicles which are more likely to pass by the DC. By using these two rules, the DDSV scheme can improve the performances of the multimedia data delivery ratio, compared with the conventional optimal vehicular data forwarding scheme. In the simulation experiments, the DDSV scheme utilizes multidatasets of Beijing city, where the average delay for data collection can be decreased by 17.3% in general, and by 41.8% in the suburban areas; the average data delivery ratio can be improved by 16.9% in comparison to the previous studies.