Autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) exhibits great application potential with its wide coverage, flexible network topology, and diversified services. However, ensuring communication security and efficient spectrum resource utilization in multiuser access scenarios is challenging, given the open nature of AAV channels and the proliferation of communication devices in IoT. To address the above challenges, this article proposes a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided AAV collaborative communication framework, where RIS-equipped AAV flexibly serves multiple users. In this work, a rate splitting multiple access (RSMA)-based secure transmission scheme is proposed, where the split public information serves both as useful signals and noise to disrupt eavesdropping. For the proposed scheme, a sum secrecy rate maximization problem is formulated and solved by optimally deploying the AAV’s location, designing the RIS’s phase shift, and power allocation. For this nonconvex problem with a couple of variables, we decompose it and form three separate subissues. Specifically, leveraging the successive convex approximation (SCA) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques, we first exploit an iterative algorithm for optimizing beamforming vectors and phase-shift matrix of RIS, and the optimal position of the AAV is obtained according to the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). Then, we design an alternating optimization (AO) framework for joint solving. Finally, simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in enhancing security, e.g., relative to the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme and benchmark scheme, the secrecy rate of the proposed scheme increased by 29.7% and 71.9%, respectively.

Abstract Watermark adding is one of the important means for image security and privacy protection in Internet of things (IOT) applications based on federated learning. It is often inseparable from adversarial training with watermark removal algorithms. The effect of watermark removal algorithms will directly affect the final result of watermark addition. However, the existing watermark removal algorithms have drawbacks such as incomplete image watermark removal, poor image quality after watermark removal, large demand for training data, and incorrect filling, which seriously affects the development of image information security and privacy protection in IOT applications based on federated learning. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an improved image watermark removal convolutional network model based on deep image prior. First, we improve the U‐Net network model, using six downsamping layers and six deconvolution layers combined with deep image prior method to reduce the loss of details and perceive high‐level features, thereby improving the ability of the network to extract high‐level features of the image. In addition, we design a new type of loss function which is called stair loss, and add L1 loss and perception loss to establish new constraints. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, a comprehensive experimental comparison was conducted on the public dataset PASCAL VOC 2012 in the same experimental environment with CGAN and the deep prior method. The experimental results show that the improved model combined with the deep image prior method can extract the high‐level feature information and can directly remove the watermark from the picture without pretraining the network, the L1 loss and perceptual loss can better retain the image structure information and speed up the watermark removal of the model, the stair loss corrects the final output more accurately by correcting the output of each layer; our method improves the learning ability of the model, and under the condition of the same training time, the image quality after watermark removal is higher, and the final watermark removal result is better, which is more suitable for distributed structure of IoT application based on federated learning.

Edge enabled Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform is of great significance to accelerate the development of smart industry. However, with the dramatic increase in real-time IIoT applications, it is a great challenge to support fast response time, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. To address this issue, time sensitive network (TSN) is recently researched to realize low latency communication via deterministic scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, the combinability of multiple flows, which can significantly affect the scheduling performance, has never been systematically analyzed before. In this article, we first analyze the combinability problem. Then, a noncollision theory based deterministic scheduling (NDS) method is proposed to achieve ultralow latency communication for the time-sensitive flows. Moreover, to improve bandwidth utilization, a dynamic queue scheduling (DQS) method is presented for the best-effort flows. Experiment results demonstrate that NDS/DQS can well support deterministic ultralow latency services and guarantee efficient bandwidth utilization.

As an important carrier of healthcare data, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) generated from various sensors, i.e., wearable, implantable, are extremely valuable research materials for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The efficient circulation of EMRs can improve remote medical services and promote the development of the related healthcare industry. However, in traditional centralized data sharing architectures, the balance between privacy and traceability still cannot be well handled. To address the issue that malicious users cannot be locked in the fully anonymous sharing schemes, we propose a trackable anonymous remote healthcare data storing and sharing scheme over decentralized consortium blockchain. Through an "on-chain & off-chain" model, it relieves the massive data storage pressure of medical blockchain. By introducing an improved proxy re-encryption mechanism, the proposed scheme realizes the fine-gained access control of the outsourced data, and can also prevent the collusion between semi-trusted cloud servers and data requestors who try to reveal EMRs without authorization. Compared with the existing schemes, our solution can provide a lower computational overhead in repeated EMRs sharing, resulting in a more efficient overall performance.

Nowadays, Federated Learning (FL) over Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices has become a current research hotspot. As a new architecture, FL can well protect the data privacy of IoMT devices, but the security of neural network model transmission can not be guaranteed. On the other hand, the sizes of current popular neural network models are usually relatively extensive, and how to deploy them on the IoMT devices has become a challenge. One promising approach to these problems is to reduce the network scale by quantizing the parameters of the neural networks, which can greatly improve the security of data transmission and reduce the transmission cost. In the previous literature, the fixed-point quantizer with stochastic rounding has been shown to have better performance than other quantization methods. However, how to design such quantizer to achieve the minimum square quantization error is still unknown. In addition, how to apply this quantizer in the FL framework also needs investigation. To address these questions, in this paper, we propose FedMSQE - Federated Learning with Minimum Square Quantization Error, that achieves the smallest quantization error for each individual client in the FL setting. Through numerical experiments in both single-node and FL scenarios, we prove that our proposed algorithm can achieve higher accuracy and lower quantization error than other quantization methods.

Automated container terminal (ACT) is considered as port industry development direction, and accurate kinematic data (speed, volume, etc.) is essential for enhancing ACT operation efficiency and safety. Port surveillance videos provide much useful spatial-temporal information with advantages of easy obtainable, large spatial coverage, etc. In that way, it is of great importance to analyze automated guided vehicle (AGV) trajectory movement from port surveillance videos. Motivated by the newly emerging computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, we propose an ensemble framework for extracting vehicle speeds from port-like surveillance videos for the purpose of analyzing AGV moving trajectory. Firstly, the framework exploits vehicle position in each image via a feature-enhanced scale-aware descriptor. Secondly, we match vehicle position and trajectory data from the previous step output via Kalman filter and Hungarian algorithm, and thus we obtain the vehicular imaging trajectory in a frame-by-frame manner. Thirdly, we estimate the vehicular moving speed in real-world via the help of perspective projection theory. The experimental results suggest that our proposed framework can obtain accurate vehicle kinematic data under typical port traffic scenarios considering that the average measurement error of root mean square deviation is 0.675 km/h, the mean absolute deviation is 0.542 km/h, and the Pearson correlation coefficient is 0.9349. The research findings suggest that cutting-edge AI and computer vision techniques can accurately extract on-site vehicular trajectory related data from port videos, and thus help port traffic participants make more reasonable management decisions.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the essential component of Industry 4.0. Blockchain is a promising technology for secure data sharing and trustable cooperation between IIoT devices. However, the ever-growing transaction records make it difficult for the storage-limited IIoT devices to join the blockchain network. In this article, an adaptive compression scheme is proposed to decrease the storage volume on each node. In the scheme, the block body is compressed by representing the included transactions as their remainders stored in the distributed nodes. The original transaction could be recovered based on the Chinese remainder theorem. In particular, each node adapts its compression ratio according to its storage resource. The nodes storing more data have advantages in transaction recovery, introducing an incentive mechanism for efficient storage utilization. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a high compression ratio with good service availability. The proposed scheme dramatically lowers the threshold for IIoT devices to join the blockchain network, which is important for the large-scale application of blockchain in Industry 4.0.

With the rapid development of Industry 4.0, the industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) are expected to realize the digital sensing, automatic control, and refined management in smart factories. However, limited bandwidth resources and severe industrial interference make it difficult to meet the real-time and ultrahigh reliability in edge computing (EC)-based next-generation industrial automation networks. To tackle these challenges, in this article, we propose a real-time transmission optimization scheme to accelerate EC. First, we establish a hierarchical system model for smart manufacturing and automation scenarios. Then we present a power control optimization method based on noncooperative game to alleviate interference and reduce energy consumption. Finally, we propose a path optimization scheme based on Q-learning for low-latency and ultrahigh reliability transmission requirements. Extensive simulation results reveal that our proposals perform better in terms of transmission delay and packet-loss rate compared with traditional methods, and therefore, contributes to EC deployment in ICPS.

Internet of Things (IoT) assisted healthcare systems are designed for providing ubiquitous access and recommendations for personal and distributed electronic health services. The heterogeneous IoT platform assists healthcare services with reliable data management through dedicated computing devices. Healthcare services' reliability depends upon the efficient handling of heterogeneous data streams due to variations and errors. A Proportionate Data Analytics (PDA) for heterogeneous healthcare data stream processing is introduced in this manuscript. This analytics method differentiates the data streams based on variations and errors for satisfying the service responses. The classification is streamlined using linear regression for segregating errors from the variations in different time intervals. The time intervals are differentiated recurrently after detecting errors in the stream's variation. This process of differentiation and classification retains a high response ratio for healthcare services through spontaneous regressions. The proposed method's performance is analyzed using the metrics accuracy, identification ratio, delivery, variation factor, and processing time.

Driven by the ever-increasing requirements of autonomous vehicles, such as traffic monitoring and driving assistant, deep learning-based object detection (DL-OD) has been increasingly attractive in intelligent transportation systems. However, it is difficult for the existing DL-OD schemes to realize the responsible, cost-saving, and energy-efficient autonomous vehicle systems due to low their inherent defects of low timeliness and high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an object detection (OD) system based on edge-cloud cooperation and reconstructive convolutional neural networks, which is called Edge YOLO. This system can effectively avoid the excessive dependence on computing power and uneven distribution of cloud computing resources. Specifically, it is a lightweight OD framework realized by combining pruning feature extraction network and compression feature fusion network to enhance the efficiency of multi-scale prediction to the largest extent. In addition, we developed an autonomous driving platform equipped with NVIDIA Jetson for system-level verification. We experimentally demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of Edge YOLO on COCO2017 and KITTI data sets, respectively. According to COCO2017 standard datasets with a speed of 26.6 frames per second (FPS), the results show that the number of parameters in the entire network is only 25.67 MB, while the accuracy (mAP) is up to 47.3%.