The energy-efficient transmission schemes are crucial to realize the Energy Harvesting (EH)-based Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. Multicast, one of the D2D modes, can serve as an effective approach to address the unreliable energy supply of EH-D2D communications and can further improve energy efficiency through cooperation among multiple users, but it has been rarely explored. To achieve the robust and energy-efficient performance for EH-D2D Multicast communications (EH-D2MD), we first design two cooperative transmission schemes: multi-cluster head content cooperation and single-cluster head energy cooperation by integrating the features of D2MD mode, efficient energy management method and wireless power transfer technology. To investigate the effectiveness and adaptability of the two cooperative schemes, we formulate a long-term average energy-efficient utility problem, which allocate the cluster heads, cooperative time and transmission power simultaneously and adaptively. We then propose an Online Convex Approximation (OCA) algorithm that combines the Lyapunov and convex approximation methods to address the non-convex Mixed Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP) property of the modeled problem. With OCA, we can convert the long-term non-convex MINLP problem into a real-time convex MINLP problem, and obtain an optimal solution for this problem. Results reveal that the achieved energy efficiency of two proposed schemes is at least 10 times higher than that of no cooperation method, and improves at least 50% and up to 4 times compared to the single-slot cooperative algorithms.

Location-based vehicular traffic management faces significant challenges in protecting sensitive geographical data while maintaining utility for traffic management and fairness across regions. Existing state-of-the-art solutions often fail to meet the required level of protection against linkage attacks and demographic biases, leading to privacy leakage and inequity in data analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm designed to address the challenges regarding the balance of privacy, utility, and fairness in location-based vehicular traffic management systems. In this context, utility means providing reliable and meaningful traffic information, while fairness ensures that all regions and individuals are treated equitably in data use and decision-making. Employing differential privacy techniques, we enhance data security by integrating query-based data access with iterative shuffling and calibrated noise injection, ensuring that sensitive geographical data remains protected. We ensure adherence to epsilon-differential privacy standards by implementing the Laplace mechanism. We implemented our algorithm on vehicular location-based data from Norway, demonstrating its ability to maintain data utility for traffic management and urban planning while ensuring fair representation of all geographical areas without being overrepresented or underrepresented. Additionally, we have created a heatmap of Norway based on our model, illustrating the privatized and fair representation of the traffic conditions across various cities. Our algorithm provides privacy in vehicular traffic management by effectively balancing fairness and utility.

Internet of Things (IoT) of networked robots installed at the edges of smart healthcare infrastructure (SHI) can be used to mitigate infectious diseases. Such robots can predict pandemics, and screen, diagnose, treat or perform healthcare nursing for infectious diseases. When equipped with suitable digital technologies, these robots can mitigate epidemics and predict future pandemics more efficiently. This paper proposes a co-infection model of infectious diseases, using HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 (or HAC-19) as examples, that can underlie SHI nodes (e.g., robots). The co-infection model benefits from the compartmental applications of fractional derivatives to healthcare problems. Six co-infection control parameters (e.g., awareness, counselling, COVID-19 safety protocol, COVID-19 vaccine, HIV/AIDS therapy, and COVID-19 treatment) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The HAC-19 model uses a basic reproduction number to indicate the effectiveness of the control measures. When the control parameters are effective, the results show that the HAC-19 co-infection reduces to a minimum in the population. When the control measures are not effective, the HAC-19 co-infection will be endemic. Robots, equipped with IoT at the edge of the SHI, transfer the data from the trials to the outpost network nodes in the hospital and then to the cloud for further analytics and decision-making. The results of real-world trials at three hospital locations strongly agree with the theoretical model.

One of the key challenges of current online social platforms is predicting the size of information cascades, also known as popularity prediction or cascade prediction. Accurate popularity prediction can benefit various fields, including news distribution, market decisions, and rumor detection. However, existing popularity prediction approaches concentrate more on the historical sequences of single messages, overlooking the interactions between message diffusion and the dynamic nature of social networks, which limits the timeliness and accuracy of predictions. To address this, we propose an online popularity prediction service based on minimal substitution reinforcement learning calledMSRL. Specifically, we explore a substitution theory and design a minimal substitution reinforcement learning method that models diffusion as message substitution and considers mutual information diffusion. That helps the model gain a broader perspective, allowing it to fully exploit the cooperative, competitive, or dependent relationships between information diffusions. Furthermore, the reinforcement learning scheme enables the service to dynamically adjust its parameters to respond to the dynamic social network environment in real-time. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the MSRL outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding accuracy and service agility.

Communication network failure, e.g., persistent packet loss, may considerably affect the safe and stable operation of smart grids. This may degrade the performance of various components and applications, including energy management and economic dispatch. We propose a switched surplus-based distributed security dispatch approach to cope with the persistent packet loss under an unreliable communication network environment. First, we jointly consider the packet loss sequence and the dynamic triggering sequence to define actual affected periods caused by the persistent packet loss. Then, we outline an incentive scheme, integrate primal-dual analysis and eigenvalue perturbation theory to design the switched surplus-based distributed security dispatch algorithm. Further, we design a dynamic triggering mechanism that enables the proposed algorithm to dynamically switch to different modes according to the change in network state. With those components, the proposed method offers strong robustness against persistent packet loss. In addition, we provide the convergence and optimality proofs of the algorithm. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the proposed method and to demonstrate its effectiveness.

The transition of the power system into a low-carbon power system (LCPS) with a high penetration of renewable energy resources addresses several issues related to energy and climate. However, due to the uncertainty associated with renewable power generation (RPG), deriving an accurate effective locational marginal pricing (LMP) for an LCPS remains a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a novel information theory-based framework for LMP calculation that quantifies the fluctuations in the LMP due to uncertainty associated with RPG and random loads in an LCPS. First, based on the information entropy levelized cost of energy, we introduce the equivalent cost of RPG to ensure that the cost of RPG is not zero under the LMP mechanism so that it can bid reasonably in the market to provide accurate price signals. We, then, design a security-constrained economic dispatch model incorporating the RPG equivalent cost to balance uncertainty and energy demand in the LCPS electricity market. Furthermore, we propose an uncertainty-constrained model of buses and branches in LCPS based on information theory that is developed to clarify the physical significance of the information that reduces generation and load uncertainty within the LMP framework.

Digital twins (DTs), defined as the virtual representation of a real-world entity or system, act as a mirror to provide a way to simulate, predict physical behaviors, and possibly control the real-world entity where applicable. Originating in the industry, advances in computing capacity and recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics make DTs attractive to a broader set of use cases including mobile networks.

6G communication networks are expected to become an integral part of the infrastructure needed for developing a smart society in the future. Addressing the challenges on the road towards realizing 6G network requirements in terms of quality of service, user experience, and security, is therefore of utmost importance. The digital twin (DT) technology can potentially improve the efficiency, reliability, and security of 6G networks. Digital twins for mobile networks (DTMNs) are seen as a key factor in harnessing the full benefits of 6G. Using digital twins can help address several problems, including network optimization, fault diagnosis, and fault management. Furthermore, DTMNs can characterize the physical entities in a 6G network and their relationships to each other, build their virtual models, and use simulation, learning, and reasoning capabilities to make predictions and support informed decision-making,

The dramatically growing trend of vehicles equipped with driving camera recorders has allowed realizing real-time crowdsourced video sharing in vehicular edge computing (VEC). Such cameras can assist in monitoring objects directly in front of and behind the vehicles, enabling them to provide important visual information through real-time video streaming in case of possible accidents. Exploiting the on-board units (OBUs) for VEC can allow drivers and passengers to share and access on-road video surveillance services. However, data security and privacy concerns of video generators (owners) are two key challenges that can severely limit video sharing in a VEC environment. In this article, we propose a blockchain empowered publish/subscribe (P/S) scheme to enable one-to-many secure video sharing in the VEC scenario. Then, we design an attribute-based encryption algorithm with static and dynamic attributes (ABE-SD) to achieve fine-grained access control in a mobile environment. Finally, We utilize permissioned blockchain and smart contracts to record access policy and publish and subscribe events, thus resulting in user self-certification and event traceability. The numerical results indicate that our proposed scheme ABE-SD outperforms traditional centralized CP-ABE methods in terms of encryption and decryption performance. The simulation experiments demonstrated that the proposed video-sharing scheme is secure and efficient.

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles (EVs) poses a significant challenge for the power grid operator in terms of increasing peak load and power quality reduction. Moreover, there is a growing demand for fast charging services in smart grids. Addressing the growing demand from fast charging services is challenging. To overcome this challenge, in this article, we propose a new computational architecture combining energy trading and demand responses based on cloud computing for managing virtual power plants (VPPs) in smart grids. In the proposed system, EVs can be charged at high charging rates without affecting the operation of the power grid by purchasing energy through the energy trading platform in the cloud. In addition, users with storage devices can sell energy surplus to the market. On the one hand, the energy trading platform can be regarded as an internal market of the VPP that aims to maximize its revenue. The interest of the EV owners, on the other hand, is to minimize the cost for charging. Therefore, we model the interactions between the EV owners and the VPP as a non-cooperative game. To search for the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game, we design an algorithm and then analyze its computational complexity and communication overhead. We utilize real data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Our results illustrate that the users with only storage devices can obtain nearly$200\%$200%higher revenue on average by participating in the proposed internal market. Moreover, users with only EVs can reduce their charging costs by nearly$50\%$50%in average. Users with both EVs and storage devices can reduce the charging costs even further by approximately$120\%$120%where the users get profit by utilizing the internal market.

The rapid proliferation of smart vehicles along with the advent of powerful applications bring stringent requirements on massive content delivery. Although vehicular edge caching can facilitate delay-bounded content transmission, constrained storage capacity and limited serving range of an individual cache server as well as highly dynamic topology of vehicular networks may degrade the efficiency of content delivery. To address the problem, in this article, we propose a social-aware vehicular edge caching mechanism that dynamically orchestrates the cache capability of roadside units (RSUs) and smart vehicles according to user preference similarity and service availability. Furthermore, catering to the complexity and variability of vehicular social characteristics, we leverage the digital twin technology to map the edge caching system into virtual space, which facilitates constructing the social relation model. Based on the social model, a new concept of vehicular cache cloud is developed to incorporate the correlation of content storing between multiple cache-enabled vehicles in diverse traffic environments. Then, we propose deep learning empowered optimal caching schemes, jointly considering the social model construction, cache cloud formation, and cache resource allocation. We evaluate the proposed schemes based on real traffic data. Numerical results demonstrate that our edge caching schemes have great advantages in optimizing caching utility.

Energy saving for mobile devices is considered to be one of prospective benefits of mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, where computation-intensive tasks can be offloaded from the mobile devices to their associated MEC servers for execution. Extra energy consumption for data migration should therefore be less than the energy consumption for local execution. However, in multi-cell MEC-assisted networks, due to both the presence of co-channel interference and the latency requirement of each offloading task, power control is tightly coupled with computation offloading, which becomes an obstacle to achieve the aim of energy saving. In this paper, we develop an analytic model to decouple power control and computation resource allocation from each other, in which the transmission power can be considered as a solution to a set of linear equations with a coefficient matrix depending on the computation resource budget. Based on this analytic foundation, we show that with a fixed offloading decision, the joint power control and computation resource allocation problem is invex, which ensures that every KKT (Karush–Kuhn–Tucker) stationary point of the problem must be a global minimizer. Moreover, we deduce a criterion for energy-efficient offloading decision making from the partial derivative of the total energy consumption of mobile devices with respect to the computation resource budget. Finally, we propose a heuristic algorithms to jointly optimizing power and computation resource allocation, and offloading decision. The numerical results demonstrate the optimality and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Emerging technologies, such as mobile-edge computing (MEC) and next-generation communications are crucial for enabling rapid development and deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). With the increasing scale of IoT networks, how to optimize the network and allocate the limited resources to provide high-quality services remains a major concern. The existing work in this direction mainly relies on models that are of less practical value for resource-limited IoT networks, and can hardly simulate the dynamic systems in real time. In this article, we integrate digital twins with edge networks and propose the digital twin edge networks (DITENs) to fill the gap between physical edge networks and digital systems. Then, we propose a blockchain-empowered federated learning scheme to strengthen communication security and data privacy protection in DITEN. Furthermore, to improve the efficiency of the integrated scheme, we propose an asynchronous aggregation scheme and use digital twin empowered reinforcement learning to schedule relaying users and allocate spectrum resources. Theoretical analysis and numerical results confirm that the proposed scheme can considerably enhance both communication efficiency and data security for IoT applications.

Sixth-generation (6G) is envisioned to be characterized by ubiquitous connectivity, extremely low latency, and enhanced edge intelligence. However, enriching 6G with these features requires addressing new, unique, and complex challenges specifically at the edge of the network. In this article, we propose a wireless digital twin edge network model by integrating digital twin with edge networks to enable new functionalities, such as hyper-connected experience and low-latency edge computing. To efficiently construct and maintain digital twins in the wireless digital twin network, we formulate the edge association problem with respect to the dynamic network states and varying network topology. Furthermore, according to the different running stages, we decompose the problem into two subproblems, including digital twin placement and digital twin migration. Moreover, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm to find the optimal solution to the digital twin placement problem, and then use transfer learning to solve the digital twin migration problem. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme provides reduced system cost and enhanced convergence rate for dynamic network states.

Blockchain is a promising emerging technology that is envisioned to play a key role in establishing secure and reliable Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystems without the involvement of any third party. Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain system that can yield high throughput and low consensus delay, has shown its capability in enhancing security and privacy protection for delay-sensitive IoT services. The literature, however, has not considered the conflicting transaction problem which may substantially limit the system performance and degrade QoS for the end users. In this article, we propose CATP-Fabric, a new blockchain system to address the conflicting transaction problem by reducing the number of potentially conflicting transactions with less overhead. First, the transactions within a block are divided into different groups to facilitate parallel transaction processing. Then, CATP-Fabric filters stale transactions and prioritizes the read-only transactions in each group to eliminate unnecessary overhead. Finally, we formulate the selection of aborting transactions in CATP-Fabric as a binary integer-programming problem and develop a low-complexity optimization algorithm to minimize the number of aborted transactions. Illustrative results show that our proposed CATP-Fabric blockchain system achieves high throughput of successful transactions while maintaining a lower aborting transaction rate compared to the benchmark blockchain systems.

The power consumption of households has been constantly growing over the years. To cope with this growth, intelligent management of the consumption profile of the households is necessary, such that the households can save the electricity bills, and the stress to the power grid during peak hours can be reduced. However, implementing such a method is challenging due to the existence of randomness in the electricity price and the consumption of the appliances. To address this challenge, in this article, we employ a model-free method for the households, which works with limited information about the uncertain factors. More specifically, the interactions between households and the power grid can be modeled as a noncooperative stochastic game, where the electricity price is viewed as a stochastic variable. To search for the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game, we adopt a method based on distributed deep reinforcement learning. Also, the proposed method can preserve the privacy of the households. We then utilize real-world data from Pecan Street Inc., which contains the power consumption profile of more than 1000 households, to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. In average, the results reveal that we can achieve around 12% reduction on peak-to-average ratio and 11% reduction on load variance. With this approach, the operation cost of the power grid and the electricity cost of the households can be reduced.

Wind power is a clean and widely deployed alternative to reducing our dependence on fossil fuel power generation. Under this trend, more turbines will be installed in wind farms. However, the inspection of the turbines in an offshore wind farm is a challenging task because of the harsh environment (e.g., rough sea, strong wind, and so on) that leads to high risk for workers who need to work at considerable height. Also, inspecting increasing number of turbines requires long man hours. In this regard, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can play an important role for automated inspection of the turbines for the operator, thus reducing the inspection time, man hours, and correspondingly the risk for the workers. In this case, the optimal number of UAVs enough to inspect all turbines in the wind farm is a crucial parameter. In addition, finding the optimal path for the UAVs' routes for inspection is also important and is equally challenging. In this article, we formulate a placement optimization problem to minimize the number of UAVs in the wind farm and a routing optimization problem to minimize the inspection time. Wind has an impact on the flying range and the flying speed of UAVs, which is taken into account for both problems. The formulated problems are NP-hard. We therefore design heuristic algorithms to find solutions to both problems, and then analyze the complexity of the proposed algorithms. The data of the Walney wind farm are then utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results clearly show that the proposed methods can obtain the optimal routing path for UAVs during the inspection.

The rapid development of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) requires industrial production towards digitalization to improve network efficiency. Digital Twin is a promising technology to empower the digital transformation of IIoT by creating virtual models of physical objects. However, the provision of network efficiency in IIoT is very challenging due to resource-constrained devices, stochastic tasks, and resources heterogeneity. Distributed resources in IIoT networks can be efficiently exploited through computation offloading to reduce energy consumption while enhancing data processing efficiency. In this article, we first propose a new paradigm digital twin network to build network topology and the stochastic task arrival model in IIoT systems. Then, we formulate the stochastic computation offloading and resource allocation problem to minimize the long-term energy efficiency. As the formulated problem is a stochastic programming problem, we leverage Lyapunov optimization technique to transform the original problem into a deterministic per-time slot problem. Finally, we present asynchronous actor-critic algorithm to find the optimal stochastic computation offloading policy. Illustrative results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is able to significantly outperforms the benchmarks.

Emerging technologies, such as digital twins and 6th generation (6G) mobile networks, have accelerated the realization of edge intelligence in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The integration of digital twin and 6G bridges the physical system with digital space and enables robust instant wireless connectivity. With increasing concerns on data privacy, federated learning has been regarded as a promising solution for deploying distributed data processing and learning in wireless networks. However, unreliable communication channels, limited resources, and lack of trust among users hinder the effective application of federated learning in IIoT. In this article, we introduce the digital twin wireless networks (DTWN) by incorporating digital twins into wireless networks, to migrate real-time data processing and computation to the edge plane. Then, we propose a blockchain empowered federated learning framework running in the DTWN for collaborative computing, which improves the reliability and security of the system and enhances data privacy. Moreover, to balance the learning accuracy and time cost of the proposed scheme, we formulate an optimization problem for edge association by jointly considering digital twin association, training data batch size, and bandwidth allocation. We exploit multiagent reinforcement learning to find an optimal solution to the problem. Numerical results on real-world dataset show that the proposed scheme yields improved efficiency and reduced cost compared to benchmark learning methods.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence and 5G paradigm, opens up new possibilities for emerging applications in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, the large amount of data, the limited resources of Internet of Things devices, and the increasing concerns of data privacy, are major obstacles to improve the quality of services in IIoT. In this article, we propose the digital twin edge networks (DITENs) by incorporating digital twin into edge networks to fill the gap between physical systems and digital spaces. We further leverage the federated learning to construct digital twin models of IoT devices based on their running data. Moreover, to mitigate the communication overhead, we propose an asynchronous model update scheme and formulate the federated learning scheme as an optimization problem. We further decompose the problem and solve the subproblems based on the deep neural network model. Numerical results show that our proposed federated learning scheme for DITEN improves the communication efficiency and reduces the transmission energy cost.

Uncoordinated charging of a rapidly growing number of electric vehicles (EVs) and the uncertainty associated with renewable energy resources may constitute a critical issue for the electric mobility (E-Mobility) in the transportation system especially during peak hours. To overcome this dire scenario, we introduce a stochastic game to study the complex interactions between the power grid and charging stations. In this context, existing studies have not taken into account the dynamics of customers’ preference on charging parameters. In reality, however, the choice of the charging parameters may vary over time, as the customers may change their charging preferences. We model this behavior of customers with another stochastic game. Moreover, we define a quality of service (QoS) index to reflect how the charging process influences customers’ choices on charging parameters. We also develop an online algorithm to reach the Nash equilibria for both stochastic games. Then, we utilize real data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms. The results reveal that the electricity cost with the proposed method can result in a saving of about 20% compared to the benchmark method, while also yielding a higher QoS in terms of charging and waiting time. Our results can be employed as guidelines for charging service providers to make efficient decisions under uncertainty relative to power generation of renewable energy.

With the exploitation of wind power, more turbines will be deployed at remote areas possibly with harsh working conditions (e.g., offshore wind farm). The adverse working environment may lead to massive operating and maintenance costs of turbines. Deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for turbine inspection is considered as a viable alternative to manual inspections. An important objective of automated UAV inspection is to minimize the flight time of the UAVs to inspect all the turbines. A first contribution of this paper is thus formulating an optimization problem to compute the optimal routes for turbine inspection satisfying the above goal. On the other hand, the limited computational capability on UAVs can be used to increase the power generation of wind turbine. Power generation from the turbines can be optimized by controlling the yaw angle of the turbines. Forecasting wind conditions such as wind speed and wind direction is crucial for solving both optimization problems. Therefore, UAVs can utilize their limited computational capability to perform wind forecasting. In this way, UAVs form edge intelligence in offshore wind farm. With the forecasted wind conditions, we design two algorithms to solve the formulated problems, and then evaluate the proposed methods with real-world data. The results reveal that the proposed methods offer an improvement of 44% of the power generation from the turbine compared to hour-ahead forecasting and 25% reduction of the flight time of the UAVs compared to the chosen baseline method.

Efficient and smart business processes are heavily dependent on the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where end-to-end optimization is critical to the success of the whole ecosystem. These systems, including industrial, healthcare, and others, are large scale complex networks of heterogeneous devices. This introduces many security and access control challenges. Blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for addressing several such challenges. However, the basic algorithms used in the business blockchain are not feasible for large scale IoT systems. To make them scalable for IoT, the complex consensus-based security has to be downgraded. In this article, we propose a novel lightweight proof of block and trade (PoBT) consensus algorithm for IoT blockchain and its integration framework. This solution allows the validation of trades as well as blocks with reduced computation time. Also, we present a ledger distribution mechanism to decrease the memory requirements of IoT nodes. The analysis and evaluation of security aspects, computation time, memory, and bandwidth requirements show significant improvement in the performance of the overall system.

Crowdsensing systems collect various types of data from sensors embedded on mobile devices owned by individuals. These individuals are commonly referred to as workers that complete tasks published by crowdsensing systems. Because of the relative lack of control over worker identities, crowdsensing systems are susceptible to data poisoning attacks which interfering with data analysis results by injecting fake data conflicting with ground truth. Frameworks like TruthFinder can resolve data conflicts by evaluating the trustworthiness of the data providers. These frameworks somehow make crowdsensing systems more robust since they can limit the impact of dirty data by reducing the value of unreliable workers. However, previous work has shown that TruthFinder may also be affected by the data poisoning attack when the malicious workers have access to global information. In this article, we focus on partially observable data poisoning attacks in crowdsensing systems. We show that even if the malicious workers only have access to local information, they can find effective data poisoning attack strategies to interfere with crowdsensing systems with TruthFinder. First, we formally model the problem of partially observable data poisoning attack against crowdsensing systems. Then, we propose a data poisoning attack method based on deep reinforcement learning, which helps malicious workers jeopardize with TruthFinder while hiding themselves. Based on the method, the malicious workers can learn from their attack attempts and evolve the poisoning strategies continuously. Finally, we conduct experiments on real-life data sets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the high penetration of large-scale distributed renewable energy generation, the power system is facing enormous challenges in terms of the inherent uncertainty of power generation of renewable energy resources. In this regard, virtual power plants (VPPs) can play a crucial role in integrating a large number of distributed generation units (DGs) more effectively to improve the stability of the power systems. Due to the uncertainty and nonlinear characteristics of DGs, reliable economic dispatch in VPPs requires timely and reliable communication between DGs, and between the generation side and the load side. The online economic dispatch optimizes the cost of VPPs. In this article, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm for the optimal online economic dispatch strategy in VPPs. By utilizing DRL, our proposed algorithm reduced the computational complexity while also incorporating large and continuous state space due to the stochastic characteristics of distributed power generation. We further design an edge computing framework to handle the stochastic and large-state space characteristics of VPPs. The DRL-based real-time economic dispatch algorithm is executed online. We utilize real meteorological and load data to analyze and validate the performance of our proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed DRL-based algorithm can successfully learn the characteristics of DGs and industrial user demands. It can learn to choose actions to minimize the cost of VPPs. Compared with the deterministic policy gradient algorithm and DDPG, our proposed method has lower time complexity.

In this article, we propose a cooperative edge caching scheme, a new paradigm to jointly optimize the content placement and content delivery in the vehicular edge computing and networks, with the aid of the flexible trilateral cooperations among a macro-cell station, roadside units, and smart vehicles. We formulate the joint optimization problem as a double time-scale Markov decision process (DTS-MDP), based on the fact that the time-scale of content timeliness changes less frequently as compared to the vehicle mobility and network states during the content delivery process. At the beginning of the large time-scale, the content placement/updating decision can be obtained according to the content popularity, vehicle driving paths, and resource availability. On the small time-scale, the joint vehicle scheduling and bandwidth allocation scheme is designed to minimize the content access cost while satisfying the constraint on content delivery latency. To solve the long-term mixed integer linear programming (LT-MILP) problem, we propose a nature-inspired method based on the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) framework to obtain a suboptimal solution with a low computation complexity. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed cooperative caching system can reduce the system cost, as well as the content delivery latency, and improve content hit ratio, as compared to the noncooperative and random edge caching schemes.

Driven by technologies such as mobile edge computing and 5G, recent years have witnessed the rapid development of urban informatics, where a large amount of data is generated. To cope with the growing data, artificial intelligence algorithms have been widely exploited. Federated learning is a promising paradigm for distributed edge computing, which enables edge nodes to train models locally without transmitting their data to a server. However, the security and privacy concerns of federated learning hinder its wide deployment in urban applications such as vehicular networks. In this article, we propose a differentially private asynchronous federated learning scheme for resource sharing in vehicular networks. To build a secure and robust federated learning scheme, we incorporate local differential privacy into federated learning for protecting the privacy of updated local models. We further propose a random distributed update scheme to get rid of the security threats led by a centralized curator. Moreover, we perform the convergence boosting in our proposed scheme by updates verification and weighted aggregation. We evaluate our scheme on three real-world datasets. Numerical results show the high accuracy and efficiency of our proposed scheme, whereas preserve the data privacy.

The rapid increase in the volume of data generated from connected devices in industrial Internet of Things paradigm, opens up new possibilities for enhancing the quality of service for the emerging applications through data sharing. However, security and privacy concerns (e.g., data leakage) are major obstacles for data providers to share their data in wireless networks. The leakage of private data can lead to serious issues beyond financial loss for the providers. In this article, we first design a blockchain empowered secure data sharing architecture for distributed multiple parties. Then, we formulate the data sharing problem into a machine-learning problem by incorporating privacy-preserved federated learning. The privacy of data is well-maintained by sharing the data model instead of revealing the actual data. Finally, we integrate federated learning in the consensus process of permissioned blockchain, so that the computing work for consensus can also be used for federated training. Numerical results derived from real-world datasets show that the proposed data sharing scheme achieves good accuracy, high efficiency, and enhanced security.

Empowered with urban informatics, transportation industry has witnessed a paradigm shift. These developments lead to the need of content processing and sharing between vehicles under strict delay constraints. Mobile edge services can help meet these demands through computation offloading and edge caching empowered transmission, while cache-enabled smart vehicles may also work as carriers for content dispatch. However, diverse capacities of edge servers and smart vehicles, as well as unpredictable vehicle routes, make efficient content distribution a challenge. To cope with this challenge, in this article we develop a social-aware nobile edge computing and caching mechanism by exploiting the relation between vehicles and roadside units. By leveraging a deep reinforcement learning approach, we propose optimal content processing and caching schemes that maximize the dispatch utility in an urban environment with diverse vehicular social characteristics. Numerical results based on real urban traffic datasets demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed schemes.

The integration of Mobile-edge Computing (MEC) and Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) has been recognized as a promising technique to enhance computation capability and to prolong battery lifetime of resource-constrained wireless devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. However, it is challenging to jointly schedule energy, radio, and computational resources for coordinating heterogeneous performance requirements in wireless powered MEC systems. To fill this gap, this paper investigates the fundamental tradeoff between Energy Efficiency (EE) and delay in a multi-user wireless powered MEC system. Considering the random channel conditions and task arrivals, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem to study the EE-delay tradeoff, which optimizes network EE subject to network stability, maximum central processing unit frequency, peak transmission power, available communication resource, and energy causality constraints. Further, we propose the online computation offloading and resource allocation algorithm by transforming the original problem into a series of deterministic optimization problems in each time block based on Lyapunov optimization theory. In addition, theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm achieves the EE-delay tradeoff as [O(1/V), O(V)] and introduces a control parameter V to balance the EE-delay performance. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis and reveal the impact of various parameters to the system performance.

Offloading computation-intensive blockchain mining tasks to the edge servers (ESs) is a promising solution for blockchain-empowered Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) because the computing capabilities in IIoT are usually limited, whereas the blockchain mining tasks are computationally intensive. However, the computation offloading solutions for data processing tasks and for blockchain mining tasks have been studied separately. Moreover, most of the existing solutions for offloading assume that all IIoT devices can directly connect to the ESs or cloud data centers. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multihop cooperative and distributed computation offloading algorithm that considers the data processing tasks and the mining tasks together for blockchain-empowered IIoT. First, we study the multihop computation offloading problem for both the data processing tasks and the mining tasks to minimize the economic cost of IIoT devices. Second, we formulate the offloading problem as a potential game in which the IIoT devices can make their decisions autonomously and prove the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) for the game. Third, we design an efficient distributed algorithm based on exchanging messages between IIoT devices to achieve the NE with low computational complexity. Lastly, our experimental results demonstrate that our distributed algorithm scales well as the number of IIoT devices increases and has the minimum system cost compared with other approaches.

The emergence of computation intensive and delay sensitive on-vehicle applications makes it quite a challenge for vehicles to be able to provide the required level of computation capacity, and thus the performance. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is a new computing paradigm with a great potential to enhance vehicular performance by offloading applications from the resource-constrained vehicles to lightweight and ubiquitous VEC servers. Nevertheless, offloading schemes, where all vehicles offload their tasks to the same VEC server, can limit the performance gain due to overload. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose integrating load balancing with offloading, and study resource allocation for a multiuser multiserver VEC system. First, we formulate the joint load balancing and offloading problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem to maximize system utility. Particularly, we take IEEE 802.11p protocol into consideration for modeling the system utility. Then, we decouple the problem as two subproblems and develop a low-complexity algorithm to jointly make VEC server selection, and optimize offloading ratio and computation resource. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits fast convergence and demonstrates the superior performance of our joint optimal VEC server selection and offloading algorithm compared to the benchmark solutions.

The drastically increasing volume and the growing trend on the types of data have brought in the possibility of realizing advanced applications such as enhanced driving safety, and have enriched existing vehicular services through data sharing among vehicles and data analysis. Due to limited resources with vehicles, vehicular edge computing and networks (VECONs) i.e., the integration of mobile edge computing and vehicular networks, can provide powerful computing and massive storage resources. However, road side units that primarily presume the role of vehicular edge computing servers cannot be fully trusted, which may lead to serious security and privacy challenges for such integrated platforms despite their promising potential and benefits. We exploit consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies to achieve secure data storage and sharing in vehicular edge networks. These technologies efficiently prevent data sharing without authorization. In addition, we propose a reputation-based data sharing scheme to ensure high-quality data sharing among vehicles. A three-weight subjective logic model is utilized for precisely managing reputation of the vehicles. Numerical results based on a real dataset show that our schemes achieve reasonable efficiency and high-level of security for data sharing in VECONs.

The expected influx of Internet of Things (IoT) in 5G will provide new opportunities for uplink traffic offloading. In general, base stations with proximity require lower transmission power of the IoT device (IoTD), thus saving energy consumption as spectral efficiency (SE) of the transmissions increase. By letting IoTDs send to base stations with better link conditions the IoTDs' battery lifetime is prolonged. In this paper, we present a many-to-many offloading scheme for uplink traffic. The scheme works when link conditions are private information and gives incentives to all involved players to participate. We believe this approach is better suited for the expected complex ecosystem of 5G base station cells. The sensitivity analyses show that there is a limited gain by requiring that the link conditions are public knowledge. Further, the suggested market optimizes the SE for all involved players. Numerical results show that the IoTDs can on average increase their SE with 25% and their spectral energy efficiency with 40%. The networks which are offloaded to and from can both expect an increase in the SE of 1%-6%. Sensitivity analyses show that the market equilibrium's benefits are robust as they stay positive for a range of different network configurations. Also, the work proves that market equilibrium is stable and unique. To derive the equilibrium, two approaches are presented, a closed form solution and a distributed algorithm, that both are solvable in polynomial time.

The Internet of Things (IoT) platform has played a significant role in improving road transport safety and efficiency by ubiquitously connecting intelligent vehicles through wireless communications. Such an IoT paradigm however, brings in considerable strain on limited spectrum resources due to the need of continuous communication and monitoring. Cognitive radio (CR) is a potential approach to alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem through opportunistic exploitation of the underutilized spectrum. However, highly dynamic topology and time-varying spectrum states in CR-based vehicular networks introduce quite a few challenges to be addressed. Moreover, a variety of vehicular communication modes, such as vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle, as well as data QoS requirements pose critical issues on efficient transmission scheduling. Based on this motivation, in this paper, we adopt a deep Q -learning approach for designing an optimal data transmission scheduling scheme in cognitive vehicular networks to minimize transmission costs while also fully utilizing various communication modes and resources. Furthermore, we investigate the characteristics of communication modes and spectrum resources chosen by vehicles in different network states, and propose an efficient learning algorithm for obtaining the optimal scheduling strategies. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheduling schemes.

Led by industrialization of smart cities, numerous interconnected mobile devices, and novel applications have emerged in the urban environment, providing great opportunities to realize industrial automation. In this context, autonomous driving is an attractive issue, which leverages large amounts of sensory information for smart navigation while posing intensive computation demands on resource constrained vehicles. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a potential solution to alleviate the heavy burden on the devices. However, varying states of multiple edge servers as well as a variety of vehicular offloading modes make efficient task offloading a challenge. To cope with this challenge, we adopt a deep Q-learning approach for designing optimal offloading schemes, jointly considering selection of target server and determination of data transmission mode. Furthermore, we propose an efficient redundant offloading algorithm to improve task offloading reliability in the case of vehicular data transmission failure. We evaluate the proposed schemes based on real traffic data. Results indicate that our offloading schemes have great advantages in optimizing system utilities and improving offloading reliability.

The emergence of computation intensive on-vehicle applications poses a significant challenge to provide the required computation capacity and maintain high performance. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a new computing paradigm with a high potential to improve vehicular services by offloading computation-intensive tasks to the VEC servers. Nevertheless, as the computation resource of each VEC server is limited, offloading may not be efficient if all vehicles select the same VEC server to offload their tasks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose offloading with resource allocation. We incorporate the communication and computation to derive the task processing delay. We formulate the problem as a system utility maximization problem, and then develop a low-complexity algorithm to jointly optimize offloading decision and resource allocation. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our Joint Optimization of Selection and Computation (JOSC) algorithm compared to state of the art solutions.

Concerns have been raised regarding the economical viability for each operator to have a full regional 5G coverage. A possible solution is to have traffic offloaded to competitors. In this work we present a new scheme for optimal offloading in a stochastic environment. This is more in line with the conditions 5G base stations will face with changing link and traffic conditions. The problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game, and the players' utility functions are derived though queuing models. Numerical results illustrate that our scheme provides a global optimal resource allocation up to a threshold. The threshold is a function of the traffic load and the number of offloading candidates. Beyond the threshold players still have incentives to participate, but the market equilibrium is not globally optimal.

Due to their environment friendliness, electric vehicles (EVs) are anticipated to form a considerable fraction of vehicles for transportation in smart cities. It is essential to design an electricity charging scheme that takes the utilities of both the charging stations and the EVs into consideration. However, the self-interested nature of the EVs together with the information asymmetry between the energy demand and supply sides makes the design a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a queuing network-based model to characterize the charging process of the multiple EVs in a renewable energy-aided charging station. Based on the model, we adopt a contract theoretic approach to design an optimal charging policy in an information asymmetry scenario. Furthermore, we propose the new contract-based charging rate assignment and admission control schemes that maximize the utility of the charging station under certain charging constraints. To derive the optimal contract, we present a two-step iterative algorithm and prove its convergence. We evaluate the proposed schemes based on the IEEE 69-bus distribution test system. Results indicate that the contract-based charging schemes can effectively benefit both the charging stations and the EVs and concurrently improve the load level of the smart grid.

The increasing number of smart vehicles and their resource hungry applications pose new challenges in terms of computation and processing for providing reliable and efficient vehicular services. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a new paradigm with potential to improve vehicular services through computation offloading in close proximity to mobile vehicles. However, in the road with dense traffic flow, the computation limitation of these MEC servers may endanger the quality of offloading service. To address the problem, we propose a hierarchical cloud-based Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) offloading framework, where a backup computing server in the neighborhood is introduced to make up for the deficit computing resources of MEC servers. Based on this framework, we adopt a Stackelberg game theoretic approach to design an optimal multilevel offloading scheme, which maximizes the utilities of both the vehicles and the computing servers. Furthermore, to obtain the optimal offloading strategies, we present an iterative distributed algorithm and prove its convergence. Numerical results indicate that our proposed scheme greatly enhances the utility of the offloading service providers.

We propose a localized peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading model for locally buying and selling electricity among plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in smart grids. Unlike traditional schemes, which transport electricity over long distances and through complex electricity transportation meshes, our proposed model achieves demand response by providing incentives to discharging PHEVs to balance local electricity demand out of their own self-interests. However, since transaction security and privacy protection issues present serious challenges, we explore a promising consortium blockchain technology to improve transaction security without reliance on a trusted third party. A localized P2P Electricity Trading system with COnsortium blockchaiN (PETCON) method is proposed to illustrate detailed operations of localized P2P electricity trading. Moreover, the electricity pricing and the amount of traded electricity among PHEVs are solved by an iterative double auction mechanism to maximize social welfare in this electricity trading. Security analysis shows that our proposed PETCON improves transaction security and privacy protection. Numerical results based on a real map of Texas indicate that the double auction mechanism can achieve social welfare maximization while protecting privacy of the PHEVs.

Geo-distributed mobile cloud computing (GMCC) integrates location information into mobile cloud computing, that has high potential for a large variety of applications. In a vehicular environment, a GMCC provides a large number of resources to vehicles that are geographically close to them. However, there are few studies that focus on security and privacy issues in a GMCC scenario. Vehicles need sufficient pseudonyms to periodically change for privacy preservation. In this paper, we focus on pseudonym management in GMCC system for vehicular environment. We design a three-layer on-demand pseudonym system to manage the pseudonyms. Moreover, we propose a secure pseudonym distribution scheme for secure communication among vehicles. As the number of demanded pseudonyms varies with traffic loads in different clouds, we use a newsvendor model to address the optimal on-demand pseudonym distribution problem. Numerical results indicate our proposed schemes not only improve utility of the clouds, but also maximize utilization of the pseudonyms.

Multimedia crowdsourcing possesses a huge potential to actualize many new applications that are expected to yield tremendous benefits in diverse fields including environment monitoring, emergency rescues during natural catastrophes, online education, sports, and entertainment. Nonetheless, multimedia crowdsourcing unfolds new challenges such as big data acquisition and processing, more stringent quality of service requirements, and heterogeneity of crowdsensors. Consequently, incentive mechanisms specifically tailored to multimedia crowdsourcing applications need to be developed to fully utilize the potential of multimedia crowdsourcing. In this paper, we design an optimal incentive mechanism for the smartphone contributors to participate in a cloud-enabled multimedia crowdsourcing scheme. We establish a condition that determines whether the smartphones are eligible to participate, and provide a close form expression for the optimal duration of service from the contributors, for a given reward from the crowdsourcer. Consequently, we derive the conditions for existence of an optimal reward for the contributors from the crowdsourcer, and prove its uniqueness. We numerically illustrate the performance of our model considering logarithmic and linear cost functions for the cloud resources. The similarity of the results for different cost models corroborates the validity of our model and the results, whereas the difference in the magnitudes suggests that the strategy of the crowdsourcer as well as the strategies of the smartphone participants considerably depend on the cloud cost model.

With the aid of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks will play an important role in supporting and enhancing the distributed electricity supply in the next generation power grid-smart grid. In order to ensure stability of the power grid and satisfy the Quality of Energy (QoE) requirements of Electric Vehicles (EVs), this paper proposes a two-level group bidding mechanism for the electric energy trade between the grid and EVs. Trading information between the grid and EVs is exchanged through communication networks. EVs acted as mobile energy storage are organized to form an electricity feedback group by aggregators. The grid aims at minimizing the cost of given electricity demand while EVs expect to maximize their profits. A quantity based feedback electricity unit pricing scheme is proposed to incentivize the participation of EVs in V2G networks. Moreover, Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction-based algorithms are designed to implement our proposed mechanisms. Simulation results indicate that our mechanism is able to reduce the cost of the grid while offer EVs significant incentives to participate in the V2G power market.

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system with efficient demand response management (DRM) is critical to solve the problem of supplying electricity by utilizing surplus electricity available at electric vehicles (EVs). An incentivized DRM approach is studied to reduce the system cost and maintain the system stability. EVs are motivated with dynamic pricing determined by the group-selling-based auction. In the proposed approach, a number of aggregators sit on the first-level auction responsible to communicate with a group of EVs. EVs as bidders consider quality of energy (QoE) requirements, and report interests and decisions on the bidding process coordinated by the associated aggregator. Auction winners are determined based on the bidding prices and the amount of electricity sold by the EV bidders. We investigate the impact of the proposed mechanism on the system performance with maximum feedback power constraints of aggregators. The designed mechanism is proven to have essential economic properties. Simulation results indicate that the proposed mechanism can reduce the system cost and offer EVs significant incentives to participate in the V2G DRM operation.

It is expected that the Internet of Things (IoT) provides the foundational infrastructure for smart cities, and making ICT an enabling technology to meet major challenges associated with climate change, energy efficiency, mobility and future services. On the other hand a smart city with these requirements is usually evolving through incremental automation and integration of new components, that are digital or physical components or smart devices. To handle the growing scale and complexity of a system, an adaptive modelling method is needed for dynamic analysis and verification and/or validation, and integration. In this paper, we consider the case study of a Demand Response (DR) Programme that is to be realized by the deployment of a network of smart meters. Through this case study, we propose a component-based modelling approach and demonstrate how it deals with the growing complex architecture.

Cooperative spectrum sensing improves the reliability of detection. However, if the secondary users are selfish, they may not collaborate for sensing. In order to address this problem, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols can be designed to enforce cooperation among secondary users for spectrum sensing. In this paper, we investigate this problem using game theoretical framework. We introduce the concept of correlated equilibrium for the cooperative spectrum sensing game among non-cooperative secondary users and formulate the optimization problem for the case where secondary users have heterogeneous traffic dynamics. We show that the correlated equilibrium improves the system utility, as compared to the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. While maximizing system payoff is important, fairness is also equally important in systems with dissimilar users. In order to address fairness issue, we propose a new fair social welfare correlated equilibrium, which maximizes the system utility and ensures that the less well-off users do not starve. We employ a no-regret learning algorithm for distributed implementation of the correlated equilibrium. Finally, we propose a neighbourhood based learning algorithm and show that it achieves better performance than the no-regret algorithm.

Real time traffic such as voice and video have strict requirements on the acceptable end-to-end packet delay. When there are different types of traffic with different requirements on tolerable latency, priority based packet scheduling schemes are normally used in order to reduce the queuing delay for real time services. However, in cognitive radio networks, the time that the system spends on spectrum sensing adds further delay to the packet transmission. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to significantly reduce the overall packet delay, including the delay due to sensing for real time services in cognitive radio networks. We derive the expression for average packet delay for the proposed scheme and the simulation results match well with the analytical results. The numerical results show that the priority based scheduling scheme combined with our scheme substantially reduces the packet delay for real time applications.