Some vehicular Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications have a strict requirement on the end-to-end delay where edge computing can be used to provide a short delay for end-users by conducing efficient caching and computing at the edge nodes. However, a fast and efficient communication route creation in multi-access vehicular environment is an underexplored research problem. In this paper, we propose a collaborative learning-based routing scheme for multi-access vehicular edge computing environment. The proposed scheme employs a reinforcement learning algorithm based on end-edge-cloud collaboration to find routes in a proactive manner with a low communication overhead. The routes are also preemptively changed based on the learned information. By integrating the “proactive” and “preemptive” approach, the proposed scheme can achieve a better forwarding of packets as compared with existing alternatives. We conduct extensive and realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the proposed scheme over existing baselines.

Multi-robot systems gain considerable attention due to lower cost, better robustness, and higher scalability as compared with single-robot systems. Cooperative object transport, as a well-known use case of multi-robot systems, shows great potential in real-world applications. The design and implementation of a multi-robot system involve many technologies, specifically, communication, coordination, task allocation methods, experimental platforms, and simulators. However, most of recent multi-robot system studies focus on coordination and task allocation problems, with little focus on communications among multiple robots. In this review, we focus on the communication, validation platform, and simulator of multi-robot systems, and discuss one of the important applications, cooperative object transport. First, we study the multi-robot system fundamentals and comprehensively review the multi-robot system communication technologies. Then, the multi-robot system validating platform, testbed, simulator, and middleware used in academia and industry are investigated. Finally, we discuss recent advances in cooperative object transport, and challenges and possible future research directions for multi-robot systems.

We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory-based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has been a new paradigm to support computation-intensive and latency-sensitive services. However, the scarcity of computational resources is still a challenge. Making efficient use of sporadic idle computational resources on smart vehicles in the vicinity to extend the resource capability of each vehicle is an important research issue. In this paper, we propose Virtual Edge, which is an efficient scheme to utilize free computational resources of multiple vehicles as a virtual server to facilitate collaborative vehicular edge computing. We design a virtual edge formation algorithm that considers both the stability of virtual edge and the computational resources available at the vehicles constituting the virtual edge. The prediction of the link duration between vehicles reduces the number of computation offloading failures caused by unexpected link disconnections. Extensive simulations with realistic vehicle movements are conducted to show the advantage of the proposed scheme over existing baselines in terms of the completion ratio of computation offloading tasks and average task execution time.

With the arrival of 5G, the wireless network will be provided with abundant spectrum resources, massive data transmissions and low latency communications, which makes Vehicle-to-Everything applications possible. However, VANETs always accompany with frequent network topology changes due to the highly mobile feature of vehicles. As a result, the network performance will be affected by the frequent handover. In this paper, a seamless handover scheme is proposed where the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technologies are employed to adapt to the dynamic topology change in VANETs. The introduction of SDN provides a global view of network topology and centralized control, which enables a stable transmission layer connection when a handover takes place, so that the upper layer performance is not influenced by the network changes. By employing MEC server, the data are cached in advance before a handover happens, so that the vehicle can restore normal communication faster. In order to confirm the superiority of our proposal, computer simulations are conducted from different aspects. The results show that our proposal can significantly improve the network performance when a handover happens.