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Mobile edge computing (MEC) and device-to-device (D2D) offloading are two promising paradigms in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In this article, we investigate task co-offloading, where computing-intensive industrial tasks can be offloaded to MEC servers via cellular links or nearby IIoT devices via D2D links. This co-offloading delivers small computation delay while avoiding network congestion. However, erratic movements, the selfish nature of devices and incomplete offloading information bring inherent challenges. Motivated by these, we propose a co-offloading framework, integrating migration cost and offloading willingness, in D2D-assisted MEC networks. Then, we investigate a learning-based task co-offloading algorithm, with the goal of minimal system cost (i.e., task delay and migration cost). The proposed algorithm enables IIoT devices to observe and learn the system cost from candidate edge nodes, thereby selecting the optimal edge node without requiring complete offloading information. Furthermore, we conduct simulations to verify the proposed co-offloading algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to meet people’s demands for intelligent and user-friendly Internet of Things (IoT) services, the amount of computation is increasing rapidly and the requirements of task delay are becoming increasingly more stringent. However, the constrained battery capacity of IoT devices greatly limits the user experience. Energy harvesting technologies enable green energy to provide continuous energy support for devices in the IoT environment. Together with the maturity of the mobile edge computing technology and the development of parallel computing, it provides a strong guarantee for the normal operation of resource-constrained IoT devices. In this article, we design a parallel offloading strategy based on Lyapunov optimization, which is conducive to efficiently finding the optimal decision for delay-sensitive and compute-intensive tasks. We establish a stochastic optimization problem on a discrete-time slot system and propose a green parallel online offloading algorithm (GPOOA). By decoupling the target problem three times, the joint optimization of green energy, task division factor, CPU frequency, and transmission power is realized. Experimental results demonstrate that under the constraints of strict task deadlines and limited server computing resources, GPOOA performs well in terms of system cost and task drop ratio, far superior to several existing offloading algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revolutionary advances in machine learning and data mining techniques have contributed greatly to the rapid developments of maritime Internet of Things (IoT). In maritime IoT, the spatio-temporal vessel trajectories, collected from the hybrid satellite-terrestrial automatic identification system (AIS) base stations, are of considerable importance for promoting traffic situation awareness and vessel traffic services, etc. To guarantee traffic safety and efficiency, it is essential to robustly and accurately predict the AIS-based vessel trajectories (i.e., the future positions of vessels) in maritime IoT. In this work, we propose a spatio-temporal multigraph convolutional network (STMGCN)-based trajectory prediction framework using the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm. Our STMGCN is mainly composed of three different graphs, which are, respectively, reconstructed according to the social force, the time to closest point of approach, and the size of surrounding vessels. These three graphs are then jointly embedded into the prediction framework by introducing the spatio-temporal multigraph convolutional layer. To further enhance the prediction performance, the self-attention temporal convolutional layer is proposed to further optimize STMGCN with fewer parameters. Owing to the high interpretability and powerful learning ability, STMGCN is able to achieve superior prediction performance in terms of both accuracy and robustness. The reliable prediction results are potentially beneficial for traffic safety management and intelligent vehicle navigation in MEC-enabled maritime IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has attracted increasing attention for improving the efficiency of manufacturing. Plenty of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications are required by IIoT networks, which pose significant challenges for the computation capacities of IIoT networks. To address these challenges, Edge-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (E-IIoT) emerges. Edge devices located at the edge of IIoT networks enlarge computation capacities of IIoT networks and improve their efficiency accordingly. How to schedule computation resources wisely is a major problem in E-IIoT networks. Since IIoT devices in an E-IIoT network monitor the industrial site collaboratively, tasks for processing sensory data collected by them are correlated accordingly. That means, scheduling highly correlated tasks to be processed at the same device can improve computation efficiency. Inspired by this fact, we propose a correlation aware scheduling (CAS) algorithm for E-IIoT networks in this article. In specific, computation model decision and processing order decision are made by considering computation resources of devices and correlations among tasks in the algorithm to minimize latency of E-IIoT networks. The NP-hardness of correlation aware latency minimization scheduling problem in E-IIoT networks is first proved. Theoretical analysis on approximation ratio of the CAS algorithm is provided, and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in reducing latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been considered as promising technologies that can satisfy rigorous requirements of industrial Internet of Things systems. However, system dynamics, including channel states and computation task requests, may continuously change NOMA decoding order and computation uploading time, making it difficult to reduce latency using conventional highly complex optimization methods. In this article, we investigate a novel scheme that effectively reduces the average task delay to improve the quality of service for all users by jointly optimizing subchannel assignment (SA), offloading decision (OD), and computation resource allocation (CRA). To deal with the high complexity, the original multiserver problem is first decomposed into multiple single-server problems. Subsequently, each single-server problem is decoupled into CRA and SA/OD subproblems. Using convex optimization, a closed-form solution is derived for the optimal CRA action. Concurrently, the optimal SA/OD action is obtained using a distributed multiagent deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes. In particular, it reduces the action decision duration by 30 times while achieving a near-optimal performance of up to 97% of the optimum under the exhaustive search scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile network operators (MNOs) allocate computing and caching resources for mobile users by deploying a central control system. Existing studies mainly use programming and heuristic methods to solve the resource allocation problem, which ignores the energy cost problem that is really significant to the MNO. To solve this problem, in this article, we design a joint computing and caching framework by integrating deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm. Especially, we focus on the Internet of Vehicles scenario, which needs the support of mobile network provided by MNO. We first formulate an optimization problem to minimize MNO’s energy cost by considering the computation and caching energy costs jointly. Then, we turn the formulated problem into a reinforcement learning problem and utilize DDPG methods to solve this problem. The final simulation result shows that our solution can reduce energy costs by more than 15%, while ensuring the tasks can be completed on time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), intensive computation workload will be imposed to industrial end units (IEUs). By leveraging mobile edge computing (MEC), the local computational tasks can be offloaded to servers deployed in mobile edge networks with low latency. This article proposes the intelligent cost-and-energy-effective task offloading in the 5G and Wi-Fi 6 coexisting heterogeneous IIoT networks. The novel joint task scheduling and resource allocation approach comprises the following two parts: a Lyapunov optimization-based component to decide local task scheduling and computing power and an online multiagent reinforcement learning component together with a game theory-based algorithm to select offloading link and decide transmit power, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed approach holds obvious advantage over the compared “intuition” and “cost optimal” approaches in the efficiency of making comprehensive decision that improves energy efficiency and cost while controlling task delay in the multi-IEU and multiaccess-node MEC systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the maneuverability and mobility control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), carrying mobile edge computing (MEC) servers on UAVs is able to effectively alleviate the explosive growth of data traffic pressure. However, UAV adopts line-of-sight transmission which has broadcasting characteristics. Malicious eavesdroppers can easily take advantage of the characteristics to eavesdrop information during the UAV edge computing. Therefore, the security of the UAV-MEC systems is a challenging problem. This article proposes a secure communication scheme for the dual-UAV-MEC system. In the proposed scheme, UAV server assists ground users in calculating the offloading tasks. In order to reduce the eavesdropping of offloading information by UAV eavesdropper, jammer sends interference signals on the ground. We aim to maximize the user's minimum secure calculation capacity by optimizing resources and trajectory of the UAV server. We first transform the optimization problem into a tractable form through mathematical methods and use successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent algorithms to solve it in an iterative manner. The final numerical results show that, compared with the benchmark schemes, the method proposed in this article effectively increases the secure calculation capacity of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A deep neural network (DNN) has become increasingly popular in industrial Internet of Things scenarios. Due to high demands on computational capability, it is hard for DNN-based applications to directly run on intelligent end devices with limited resources. Computation offloading technology offers a feasible solution by offloading some computation-intensive tasks to the cloud or edges. Supporting such capability is not easy due to two aspects: Adaptability: offloading should dynamically occur among computation nodes. Effectiveness: it needs to be determined which parts are worth offloading. This article proposes a novel approach, called DNNOff. For a given DNN-based application, DNNOff first rewrites the source code to implement a special program structure supporting on-demand offloading and, at runtime, automatically determines the offloading scheme. We evaluated DNNOff on a real-world intelligent application, with three DNN models. Our results show that, compared with other approaches, DNNOff saves response time by 12.4–66.6% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the limited local computation resource, industrial vehicular computation requires offloading the computation tasks with time-delay sensitive and complex demands to other intelligent devices (IDs) once the data is sensed and collected collaboratively. This article considers offloading partial computation tasks of the industrial vehicles (IVs) to multiple available IDs of the industrial mobile edge computing (MEC), including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and the fixed-position MEC servers, to optimize the system cost including execution time, energy consumption, and the ID rental price. Moreover, to increase the access probability of IV by the UAVs, the geographical area is divided into small partitions and schedule the UAVs regarding the regional IV density dynamically. A minimum incremental task allocation algorithm is proposed to divide the whole task and assign the divided units for the minimum cost increment each time. Experimental results show the proposed solution can significantly reduce the system cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing deployment of 5G network involves the Internet of Things (IoT) as a new technology for the development of mobile communication, where the Internet of Everything (IoE) as the expansion of IoT has catalyzed the explosion of data and can trigger new eras. However, the fundamental and key component of the IoE depends on the computational intelligence (CI), which may be utilized in the sixth generation mobile communication system (6G). The motivation of this article presents the 6G enabled network in box (NIB) architecture as a powerful integrated solution that can support comprehensive network management and operations. The 6G enabled NIB can be used as an alternative method to meet the needs of next-generation mobile networks by dynamically reconfiguring the deployment of network functions, providing a high degree of flexibility for connection services in various situations. Especially the CI technology such as evolutionary computing, neural computing and fuzzy systems utilized as a part of NIB have inherent capabilities to handle various uncertainties, which have unique advantages in processing the variability and diversity of large amounts of data. Finally, CI technology for NIB, which is widely used is also introduced such as distributed computing, fog computing, and mobile edge computing in order to achieve different levels of sustainable computing infrastructure. This article discusses the key technologies, advantages, industrial scenario applications of CI technology as NIB, typical use cases and development trends based on IoE, which provides directional guidance for the development of CI technology as NIB for 6G. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On-demand data sensing and wireless power transfer (WPT) can provide sustainability and robust operations in large-scale industrial Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The efficiency of on-demand data collection and WPT can be increased by efficient scheduling of IoT nodes and dedicated energy transmitters respectively. In this article, we propose an energy-aware mode switching strategy to enable IoT nodes to perform either on-demand sensing or dedicated WPT. For on-demand sensing, we propose an IoT node scheduling scheme to maximize the utility of the IoT nodes comprising residual energy and energy required for sensing operation while considering the reliability of sensing tasks. For WPT, we propose an energy transmitter scheduling scheme for IoT nodes to minimize the cost of charging while keeping IoT nodes sufficiently charged. The simulation results for IoT node scheduling demonstrate that less than 50% IoT nodes need to be activated in all scenarios to complete the tasks. The proposed energy transmitter scheduling scheme shows that less than 60% energy transmitters should be scheduled in all the scenarios which results in significant energy reduction in the overall system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, driven by the rapid development of smart mobile equipments and 5G network technologies, the application scenarios of Internet of Things (IoT) technology are becoming increasingly widespread. The integration of IoT and industrial manufacturing systems forms the industrial IoT (IIoT). Because of the limitation of resources, such as the computation unit and battery capacity in the IIoT equipments (IIEs), computation-intensive tasks need to be executed in the mobile edge computing (MEC) server. However, the dynamics and continuity of task generation lead to a severe challenge to the management of limited resources in IIoT. In this article, we investigate the dynamic resource management problem of joint power control and computing resource allocation for MEC in IIoT. In order to minimize the long-term average delay of the tasks, the original problem is transformed into a Markov decision process (MDP). Considering the dynamics and continuity of task generation, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based dynamic resource management (DDRM) algorithm to solve the formulated MDP problem. Our DDRM algorithm exploits the deep deterministic policy gradient and can deal with the high-dimensional continuity of the action and state spaces. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the DDRM can reduce the long-term average delay of the tasks effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new computing paradigm, edge computing emerges in various fields. Many tasks previously relied on cloud computing are distributed to various edge devices that cooperate to complete the tasks. However, circumstantial factors in the edge network (e.g., functionality, transmission efficiency, and resource limitation) become more complex than those in cloud computing. Consequently, there is instability that cannot be ignored in the cooperation between the edge devices. In this article, we propose a novel framework to optimize edge cooperative network (ECN), called ECN-Opt, to improve the performance of edge computing tasks. Specifically, we first define the evaluation metrics for cooperation. Next, the cooperation of an ECN is optimized to improve the performance of specific tasks. Extensive experiments using real datasets from wearable sensors on the players in soccer teams demonstrate that our ECN-Opt framework performs well, and it also validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) sinks computing power to the edge of networks and integrates mobile access networks and Internet services in 5G and beyond. With the continuous development of services, privacy protection is extremely important in a heterogeneous MEC system for multiserver collaboration. However, most of the existing schemes only consider the privacy of users or services other than the privacy of network topology. For the purpose of topology privacy protection, this article employs blockchain to construct heterogeneous MEC systems and adopts accommodative bloom filter as a carrier for multidomain collaborative routing consensus without exposing topology privacy. Blockchain is used to implement multiplex mutual trust networking and collaborative routing verification through the membership service and consensus mechanism. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility and performances of our scheme. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can highly improve the credibility and efficiency of MEC collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate a communication and computation problem for industrial Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where K relays can help accomplish the computation tasks with the assist of M computational access points. In industrial IoT networks, latency and energy consumption are two important metrics of interest to measure the system performance. To enhance the system performance, a three-hierarchical optimization framework is proposed to reduce the latency and energy consumption, which involves bandwidth allocation, offloading, and relay selection. Specifically, we first optimize the bandwidth allocation by presenting three schemes for the second-hop wireless relaying. We then optimize the computation offloading based on the discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm. We further present three relay selection criteria by taking into account the tradeoff between the system performance and implementation complexity. Simulation results are finally demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed three-hierarchical optimization framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system is a prominent concept, where a UAV equipped with an MEC server is deployed to serve a number of terminal devices (TDs) of Internet of Things in a finite period. In this article, each TD has a certain latency-critical computation task in each time slot to complete. Three computation strategies can be available to each TD. First, each TD can operate local computing by itself. Second, each TD can partially offload task bits to the UAV for computing. Third, each TD can choose to offload task bits to access point via UAV relaying. We propose a new optimization problem formulation that aims to minimize the total energy consumption including communication-related energy, computation-related energy and UAV’s flight energy by optimizing the bits allocation, time slot scheduling, and power allocation as well as UAV trajectory design. As the formulated problem is nonconvex and difficult to find the optimal solution, we propose to solve the problem by two parts, and obtain the near optimal solution by the Lagrangian duality method and successive convex approximation technique, respectively. By analysis, the proposed algorithm can be guaranteed to converge within a dozen of iterations. Finally, numerical results are given to validate the proposed algorithm, which is verified to be efficient and superior to the other benchmark cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate code-oriented partitioning computation offloading strategy for multiple user equipments (UEs) and multiple mobile edge computing servers with limited resources (i.e., limited computing power and waiting task queues with finite capacity). This article aims to develop an offloading strategy to decide the execution location, CPU frequency, and transmission power for UE while minimizing the execution overhead (i.e., a weighted sum of energy consumption and computational time) of UE's applications, which is an NP-hard problem. To achieve the objective, first, we transform the problem into a convex optimization problem and find the optimal solution. Second, we propose a decentralized computation offloading strategy (DCOS) algorithm for UE, and define a dictionary data structure for recording the strategy of the UE to reduce the algorithm complexity. Finally, the effectiveness of DCOS, and the impact of various key parameters on the strategy and overhead are demonstrated by simulation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Position-based services (PBSs) that deliver networked amenities based on roaming user's positions have become progressively popular with the propagation of smart mobile devices. Position is one of the important circumstances in PBSs. For effective PBSs, extraction and recognition of meaningful positions and estimating the subsequent position are fundamental procedures. Several researchers and practitioners have tried to recognize and predict positions using various techniques; however, only few deliberate the progress of position-based real-time applications considering significant tasks of PBSs. In this paper, a method for conserving position confidentiality of roaming PBSs users using machine learning techniques is proposed. We recommend a three-phase procedure for roaming PBS users. It identifies user position by merging decision trees and k-nearest neighbor and estimates user destination along with the position track sequence using hidden Markov models. Moreover, a mobile edge computing service policy is followed in the proposed paradigm, which will ensure the timely delivery of PBSs. The benefits of mobile edge service policy offer position confidentiality and low latency by means of networking and computing services at the vicinity of roaming users. Thorough experiments are conducted, and it is confirmed that the proposed method achieved above 90% of the position confidentiality in PBSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]