The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a crucial research field spawned by the Internet of Things (IoT). IIoT links all types of industrial equipment through the network; establishes data acquisition, exchange, and analysis systems; and optimizes processes and services, so as to reduce cost and enhance productivity. The introduction of edge computing in IIoT can significantly reduce the decision-making latency, save bandwidth resources, and to some extent, protect privacy. This paper outlines the research progress concerning edge computing in IIoT. First, the concepts of IIoT and edge computing are discussed, and subsequently, the research progress of edge computing is discussed and summarized in detail. Next, the future architecture from the perspective of edge computing in IIoT is proposed, and its technical progress in routing, task scheduling, data storage and analytics, security, and standardization is analyzed. Furthermore, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of edge computing in IIoT in terms of 5G-based edge communication, load balancing and data offloading, edge intelligence, as well as data sharing security. Finally, we introduce some typical application scenarios of edge computing in IIoT, such as prognostics and health management (PHM), smart grids, manufacturing coordination, intelligent connected vehicles (ICV), and smart logistics.

Heterogeneous Internet of Things (HetIoT) is an emerging research field that has strong potential to transform both our understanding of fundamental computer science principles and our future living. HetIoT is being employed in increasing number of areas, such as smart home, smart city, intelligent transportation, environmental monitoring, security systems, and advanced manufacturing. Therefore, relaying on strong application fields, HetIoT will be filled in our life and provide a variety of convenient services for our future. The network architectures of IoT are intrinsically heterogeneous, including wireless sensor network, wireless fidelity network, wireless mesh network, mobile communication network, and vehicular network. In each network unit, smart devices utilize appropriate communication methods to integrate digital information and physical objects, which provide users with new exciting applications and services. However, the complexity of application requirements, the heterogeneity of network architectures and communication technologies impose many challenges in developing robust HetIoT applications. This paper proposes a four-layer HetIoT architecture consisting of sensing, networking, cloud computing, and applications. Then, the state of the art in HetIoT research and applications have been discussed. This paper also suggests several potential solutions to address the challenges facing future HetIoT, including self-organizing, big data transmission, privacy protection, data integration and processing in large-scale HetIoT.

The development of the smart ocean requires that various features of the ocean be explored and understood. The underwater internet of things, an extension of the internet of things to the underwater environment, constitutes powerful technology for achieving the smart ocean. This paper provides an overview of the underwater internet of things with emphasis on current advances, future system architecture, applications, challenges and open issues. The Underwater Internet of Things is enabled by the most recent developments in autonomous underwater vehicles, smart sensors, underwater communication technologies, and underwater routing protocols. In the coming years, the underwater internet of things is expected to bridge diverse technologies for sensing the ocean, allowing it to become a smart network of interconnected underwater objects that has self-learning and intelligent computing capabilities. This paper first provides a horizontal overview of the underwater internet of things. Then, we present a five-layer system architecture for the future underwater internet of things, which consists of a sensing, communication, networking, fusion, and application layer. Finally, we suggest the current challenges and the future underwater internet of things research trends, in which cloud computing, fog computing, and artificial intelligence are combined.

The prompt evolution of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) promotes pervasive in-home health monitoring networks. However, excessive requirements of patients result in insufficient spectrum resources and communication overload. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enabled 5G health monitoring is conceived as a favorable paradigm to tackle such an obstacle. In this paper, we construct a cost-efficient in-home health monitoring system for IoMT by dividing it into two sub-networks, i.e., intra-Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and beyond-WBANs. Highlighting the characteristics of IoMT, the cost of patients depends on medical criticality, Age of Information (AoI) and energy consumption. For intra-WBANs, a cooperative game is formulated to allocate the wireless channel resources. While for beyond-WBANs, considering the individual rationality and potential selfishness, a decentralized non-cooperative game is proposed to minimize the system-wide cost in IoMT. We prove that the proposed algorithm can reach a Nash equilibrium. In addition, the upper bound of the algorithm time complexity and the number of patients benefiting from MEC is theoretically derived. Performance evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm with respect to the system-wide cost and the number of patients benefiting from MEC.

The broad learning system (BLS) is an emerging approach for effective and efficient modeling of complex systems. The inputs are transferred and placed in the feature nodes, and then sent into the enhancement nodes for nonlinear transformation. The structure of a BLS can be extended in a wide sense. Incremental learning algorithms are designed for fast learning in broad expansion. Based on the typical BLSs, a novel recurrent BLS (RBLS) is proposed in this paper. The nodes in the enhancement units of the BLS are recurrently connected, for the purpose of capturing the dynamic characteristics of a time series. A sparse autoencoder is used to extract the features from the input instead of the randomly initialized weights. In this way, the RBLS retains the merit of fast computing and fits for processing sequential data. Motivated by the idea of ``fine-tuning'' in deep learning, the weights in the RBLS can be updated by conjugate gradient methods if the prediction errors are large. We exhibit the merits of our proposed model on several chaotic time series. Experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of the RBLS. For chaotic benchmark datasets, the RBLS achieves very small errors, and for the real-world dataset, the performance is satisfactory.

The rapid growth of intelligent sensing capabilities and super computation power in 6G mobile communication systems has facilitated their application in diverse domains such as smart health, smart factories, and the industrial Internet of Things. Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), as a core technology, has merged with artificial intelligence (AI) to enable intelligent connectivity, leading to a paradigm shift in traditional communication modes. This paper presents a visionary design for an ISAC-oriented unified IoT architecture that integrates software-defined communication and super-intelligent agents. By leveraging dynamic adaptability, self-learning, and optimization, the ISAC system can intelligently and flexibly respond to evolving requirements and environments. The architecture is redefined into three layers: the hardware layer, the omniscient layer, and the application layer. Furthermore, a retrospective survey of ISAC technology development over the past decade is conducted, highlighting new design principles for AI-empowered networks and multi-modals that support “intelligent connectivity" across various application scenarios and reinforce the security of ISAC. This paper categorizes the related works according to the different layer structures of the proposed architecture, and some important physical and machine learning models are introduced. Additionally, we summarize the current technological bottlenecks associated with ISAC and propose future research directions and potential solutions that lay the foundation for the future development of secure and intelligent communication networks.