Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that can achieve the purpose of collaborative learning from a large amount of data that belong to different parties without sharing the raw data among the data owners. FL can sufficiently utilize the computing capabilities of multiple learning agents to improve the learning efficiency while providing a better privacy solution for the data owners. FL attracts tremendous interests from a large number of industries due to growing privacy concerns. Future vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as cooperative autonomous driving and intelligent transport systems (ITS), feature a large number of devices and privacy-sensitive data where the communication, computing, and storage resources must be efficiently utilized. FL could be a promising approach to solve these existing challenges. In this paper, we first conduct a brief survey of existing studies on FL and its use in wireless IoT. Then, we discuss the significance and technical challenges of applying FL in vehicular IoT, and point out future research directions.

Vehicular delay tolerant networks (VDTNs) enable information sharing among mobile nodes in scenarios where cellular base stations are unavailable and the connections between the mobile nodes are intermittent. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown to improve the performance of VDTNs, existing routing protocols, such as PRoPHET, consider the encounter probability between mobile nodes only, which does not fully address the characteristics of UAVs in route selection. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol, which considers both the encounter probability and the persistent connection time between mobile nodes for each encounter, in UAV-assisted VDTNs. By introducing the persistent connection time in route selection, the proposed protocol is able to evaluate the stability of a communication link more accurately in the UAV-assisted VDTN environment. The proposed protocol is evaluated using realistic simulations by comparing it with existing baselines. The simulation results verify that the proposed protocol can improve the reliability of message forwarding while reducing network overhead and end-to-end delay.

Federated learning is a promising paradigm for achieving distributed intelligence by protecting user privacy in vehicular networks. Considering limited computing and communication resources, it is important to select appropriate clients from a huge number of users to participate in the training process. In vehicular networks, the problem of choosing proper clients is particularly complex due to the heterogeneity of network users, including the differences in the data, computation capability, available throughput, and samples freshness. We design a fuzzy logic based client selection scheme to address this issue. The proposed scheme considers the number of local samples, samples freshness, computation capability, and available network throughput based on a fuzzy logic approach. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other baselines.

With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized cloud architecture cannot satisfy the exploding demand for data exchange in Internet of Vehicle (IoV) systems. Moreover, the traditional centralized architecture of the vehicular network has the potential risk of a single point of failure and lacks autonomy since the system highly relies on a trusted third party (TTP) to provide identity management. Fortunately, the emergence of blockchain technology provides a potential direction to address these problems. However, there are still some problems existing in the construction of an efficient blockchain system in IoV systems, such as the dynamic network topology and limited resources. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical resource scheduling scheme for blockchain-enabled IoV systems that improves the performance of the blockchain-enabled IoV system by efficiently allocating computational resources. The superiority of the proposed method is fully demonstrated by comparing it with existing baseline methods.

The research on multi-robot systems has been divided into various fields, such as communication, navigation, task allocation, and collaborative transport. While significant progress has been made in each area, there has been limited research integrating these fields to build a fully autonomous multi-robot collaborative transport system. Therefore, we identify the key issues and propose a multi-robot collaborative transport system founded on ROS1 and conduct validation in a simulated environment, laying a solid foundation for the system to run on real robots. The primary contributions of this study include three key areas: (1) modeling and validating robot collaborative transport, (2) developing a visual task allocation system leveraging FastDDS service, and (3) resolving path collision issues in multi-robot navigation through both traditional methods and reinforcement learning techniques. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed intelligent multi-robot collaborative transport system can autonomously navigate to target points for collaborative transport task. Performance assessments, based on the error between the target point and the object’s arrival point as well as the transport trajectory error, reveal that the system effectively completes the assigned tasks.

Edge computing has emerged as a promising solution to reduce communication delays and enhance the performance of real-time applications. However, due to the limited processing power of edge servers, it is challenging to achieve efficient task processing. In this paper, we propose a Q-learning-based load-balancing method that optimizes the distribution of real-time tasks between edge servers and cloud servers to reduce processing time. The proposed method is dynamic and adaptive, taking into account the constantly changing network status and server usage. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed load-balancing method, extensive simulations are conducted in an Edge-Cloud network environment. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces processing time compared to traditional static load-balancing methods. The Q-learning algorithm enables the load-balancing system to dynamically learn the optimal decision-making strategy to allocate tasks to the most appropriate server. Overall, the proposed Q-learning-based load-balancing method provides a dynamic and efficient solution to balance the workload between edge servers and cloud servers. The proposed method effectively achieves real-time task processing in edge computing environments and can contribute to the development of high-performance edge computing systems.