With the flourishing and advancement of the IoT, the smart city has become an emerging paradigm, consisting of ubiquitous sensing, heterogeneous network infrastructure, and intelligent information processing and control systems. A smart city can monitor the physical world in real time, and provide intelligent services to both local residents and travelers in terms of transportation, healthcare, environment, entertainment, and energy. However, security and privacy concerns arise, since smart city applications not only collect a wide range of privacy-sensitive information from people and their social circles, but also control city facilities and influence people's lives. In this article, we investigate security and privacy in smart city applications. Specifically, we first introduce promising smart city applications and architecture. Then we discuss several security and privacy challenges in these applications. Some research efforts are subsequently presented to address these security and privacy challenges for intelligent healthcare, transportation, and smart energy. Finally, we point out some open issues for future research.

Internet of Things (IoT) allows billions of physical objects to be connected to collect and exchange data for offering various applications, such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure management, and home automation. On the other hand, IoT has unsupported features (e.g., low latency, location awareness, and geographic distribution) that are critical for some IoT applications, including smart traffic lights, home energy management and augmented reality. To support these features, fog computing is integrated into IoT to extend computing, storage and networking resources to the network edge. Unfortunately, it is confronted with various security and privacy risks, which raise serious concerns towards users. In this survey, we review the architecture and features of fog computing and study critical roles of fog nodes, including real-time services, transient storage, data dissemination and decentralized computation. We also examine fog-assisted IoT applications based on different roles of fog nodes. Then, we present security and privacy threats towards IoT applications and discuss the security and privacy requirements in fog computing. Further, we demonstrate potential challenges to secure fog computing and review the state-of-the-art solutions used to address security and privacy issues in fog computing for IoT applications. Finally, by defining several open research issues, it is expected to draw more attention and efforts into this new architecture.

The emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) are vulnerable to Sybil attacks where attackers can manipulate fake identities or abuse pseudoidentities to compromise the effectiveness of the IoT and even disseminate spam. In this paper, we survey Sybil attacks and defense schemes in IoT. Specifically, we first define three types Sybil attacks: SA-1, SA-2, and SA-3 according to the Sybil attacker's capabilities. We then present some Sybil defense schemes, including social graph-based Sybil detection (SGSD), behavior classification-based Sybil detection (BCSD), and mobile Sybil detection with the comprehensive comparisons. Finally, we discuss the challenging research issues and future directions for Sybil defense in IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) extends the Internet connectivity into billions of IoT devices around the world, where the IoT devices collect and share information to reflect status of the physical world. The Autonomous Control System (ACS), on the other hand, performs control functions on the physical systems without external intervention over an extended period of time. The integration of IoT and ACS results in a new concept -autonomous IoT (AIoT). The sensors collect information on the system status, based on which the intelligent agents in the IoT devices as well as the Edge/Fog/Cloud servers make control decisions for the actuators to react. In order to achieve autonomy, a promising method is for the intelligent agents to leverage the techniques in the field of artificial intelligence, especially reinforcement learning (RL) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for decision making. In this paper, we first provide a tutorial of DRL, and then propose a general model for the applications of RL/DRL in AIoT. Next, a comprehensive survey of the state-of-art research on DRL for AIoT is presented, where the existing works are classified and summarized under the umbrella of the proposed general DRL model. Finally, the challenges and open issues for future research are identified.

With the proliferation of connected devices and emerging data-hungry applications, the volume of mobile data traffic is predicted to have a 1000-fold growth by the year 2020. To address the challenge of this data explosion, industry and academia have initiated research and development of 5G wireless networks, which are envisaged to cater to the massive data traffic volume, while providing ubiquitous connectivity and supporting diverse applications with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. To support the expected massive growth of mobile data, a large number of small cells are expected to be deployed indoors and outdoors, giving rise to heterogeneous networks (HetNets), which are considered to be the key path toward 5G. With such large-scale HetNets, network operators face many serious challenges in terms of operation and management, cost-effective small cell deployment, and intercell interference mitigation. To deal with those issues, a cloud based platform is introduced, aiming to simplify the deployment, operation and management, and facilitate round-the-clock optimization of the network, to pave the way for the development of 5G. Two case studies are provided to illustrate the benefits of the cloud based architecture. Finally, the related standardization activities are provided and some research topics essential for a successful development of 5G are discussed.

Big data offers a plethora of opportunities to mobile network operators for improving quality of service. This article explores various means of integrating big data analytics with network optimization toward the objective of improving the user quality of experience. We first propose a framework of Big Data-Driven (BDD) mobile network optimization. We then present the characteristics of big data that are collected not only from user equipment but also from mobile networks. Moreover, several techniques in data collection and analytics are discussed from the viewpoint of network optimization. Certain user cases on the application of the proposed framework for improving network performance are also given in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. With the integration of the emerging fifth generation (5G) mobile networks with big data analytics, the quality of our daily mobile life is expected to be tremendously enhanced.