Abstract Edge computing is regarded as an extension of cloud computing that brings computing and storage resources to the network edge. For some Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications such as supply‐chain supervision and collaboration, Internet of Vehicles, real‐time video analysis and so forth, users should be authenticated before visiting the geographically distributed edge servers. Limited by the considerable latency between the cloud and edge servers, and the limited capacity of edge servers, it is infeasible to copy the authentication method from cloud servers when users are authenticated in edge servers. In view of this challenge, this paper proposes a novel token‐based authentication scheme, named EdgeAuth, that enables fast edge user authentication through collaboration among cloud servers and edge servers. Under the EdgeAuth scheme, edge servers can rapidly verify the credentials of users who have been authenticated by the cloud server. EdgeAuth can also protect users from a series of authentication attacks, for example, the replay attack, DoS attack and man‐in‐the‐middle attack. The results of experiments conducted on a simulated edge computing environment validate the usefulness of EdgeAuth through a comparison in latency and throughput against two baseline schemes.

Using the powerful communication capability of 6G, various in-vehicle services in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can be offered with low delay, which provide users with a high-quality driving experience. Edge computing in 6G-enabled IoV utilizes edge servers distributed at the edge of the road, enabling rapid responses to delay-sensitive tasks. However, how to execute computation offloading effectively in 6G-enabled IoV remains a challenge. In this paper, a Computation Offloading method with Demand prediction and Reinforcement learning, named CODR, is proposed. First, a prediction method based on Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network (STGNN) is proposed. According to the predicted demand, a caching decision method based on the simplex algorithm is designed. Then, a computation offloading method based on twin delayed deterministic policy gradient (TD3) is proposed to obtain the optimal offloading scheme. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of CODR in reducing delay are demonstrated through a large number of simulation experiments.

Powered by the massive data generated by the blossom of mobile and Web-of-Things (WoT) devices, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have developed both in accuracy and size in recent years. Conventional cloud-based DNN training incurs rapidly-increasing data and model transmission overheads as well as privacy issues. Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a promising solution by facilitating DNN model training on edge servers at the network edge. However, edge servers often suffer from constrained resources and need to collaborate on DNN training. Unfortunately, managed by different telecoms, edge servers cannot properly collaborate with each other without incentives and trust. In this paper, we introduce PipeEdge, a scheme that promotes collaborative edge training between edge servers by introducing incentives and trust based on blockchain. Under the PipeEdge scheme, edge servers can hire trustworthy workers for pipelined DNN training tasks based on model parallelism. We implement PipeEdge and evaluate it comprehensively with four different DNN models. The results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art schemes by up to 173.98% with negligible overheads.

The intelligent detection process for industrial anomalies employs artificial intelligence methods to classify images that deviate from a normal appearance. Traditional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based anomaly detection algorithms mainly use the network to restructure abnormal areas and detect anomalies by calculating the errors between the original image and reconstructed image. However, the traditional CNNs struggle to extract global context information, resulting in poor anomaly detection performance. Thus, a masked Swin Transformer Unet (MSTUnet) for anomaly detection is proposed. To solve the problem of insufficient abnormal samples in the training phase, an anomaly simulation and mask strategy is first applied on anomaly-free samples to generate a simulated anomaly and, then, the Swin Transformer's powerful global learning ability is used to inpaint the masked area. Finally, a convolution-based Unet network is used for end-to-end anomaly detection. Experimental results on industrial dataset MVTec AD show that MSTUnet achieves superior anomaly detection and localization performance.

Currently, cloudlet based wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) is emerging as an effective paradigm to extend the performance of mobile devices, which enables the execution of computational intensive mobile applications. But the normal operation of cloudlets consumes a large amount of energy, which brings about carbon dioxide emissions, aggravation of the greenhouse effect, etc. Meanwhile the data transmission of various mobile users among cloudlets would cause leakage of personal privacy. In view of this challenge, we propose an energy-efficient cloudlet management method, named ECM, for privacy preservation in WMAN. Technically, an optimization model is designed to formalize our problem. Then, based on live virtual machine (VM) migration technique, a corresponding privacy-aware VM scheduling method for energy saving is designed to determine which VMs should be migrated and where they should be migrated. Finally, experimental data demonstrate that the proposed method is both efficient and effective.