The drastically increasing volume and the growing trend on the types of data have brought in the possibility of realizing advanced applications such as enhanced driving safety, and have enriched existing vehicular services through data sharing among vehicles and data analysis. Due to limited resource of vehicles, mobile edge computing integrated with vehicular networks gives rise to Vehicular Edge COmputing and Networks (VECONs) for providing powerful computing and massive storage resources. However, vehicular edge computing servers consisted of roadside units cannot be fully trusted, which may result in serious security and privacy challenges. We exploit consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies to achieve secure data storage and sharing in vehicular edge networks. These technologies efficiently prevent data sharing without authorization. In addition, we propose a reputation based data sharing scheme to ensure high-quality data sharing among vehicles. A three-weight subjective logic model is utilized for precisely managing reputation of the vehicles. Numerical results based on a real dataset show that our schemes achieve reasonable efficiency and high-level security for data sharing in VECONs.

As a distributed learning approach, federated learning trains a shared learning model over distributed datasets while preserving the training data privacy. We extend the application of federated learning to parking management and introduce FedParking in which Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) collaborate to train a long short-term memory model for parking space estimation without exchanging the raw data. Furthermore, we investigate the management of Parked Vehicle assisted Edge Computing (PVEC) by FedParking. In PVEC, different PLOs recruit PVs as edge computing nodes for offloading services through an incentive mechanism, which is designed according to the computation demand and parking capacity constraints derived from FedParking. We formulate the interactions among the PLOs and vehicles as a multi-lead multi-follower Stackelberg game. Considering the dynamic arrivals of the vehicles and time-varying parking capacity constraints, we present a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach to gradually reach the Stackelberg equilibrium in a distributed yet privacy-preserving manner. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme.

Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) has emerged as a promising technology to improve the efficiency, quality, diversity and flexibility of the content creation process by adopting a variety of generative AI models. Deploying AIGC services in wireless networks has been expected to enhance the user experience. However, the existing AIGC service provision suffers from several limitations, e.g., the centralized training in the pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference processes, especially their implementations in wireless networks with privacy preservation. Federated learning (FL), as a collaborative learning framework where the model training is distributed to cooperative data owners without the need for data sharing, can be leveraged to simultaneously improve learning efficiency and achieve privacy protection for AIGC. To this end, we present FL-based techniques for empowering AIGC, and aim to enable users to generate diverse, personalized, and high-quality content. Furthermore, we conduct a case study of FL-aided AIGC fine-tuning by using the state-of-the-art AIGC model, i.e., stable diffusion model. Numerical results show that our scheme achieves advantages in effectively reducing the communication cost and training latency, and providing privacy protection. Finally, we highlight several major research directions and open issues for the convergence of FL and AIGC.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) extends edge computing to vehicular networks by exploiting computation resources of proximate vehicles to offload tasks for service requesters. However, VEC faces several critical challenges such as the potential security issues caused by untrusted and opaque environment and the lack of incentive mechanism under a practical scenario with asymmetric information. To solve the above challenges, we propose a vehicular consortium blockchain for secure resource sharing in VEC. Then, we design multi-step smart contracts to achieve secure resource sharing and defend against the malicious behaviours of service requesters and vehicles with selfish purposes. Afterwards, a byzantine fault tolerance-based proof-of-stake (BFT-based PoS) consensus protocol is applied in vehicular consortium blockchain to reach consensus efficiently. Furthermore, we design a contract-based incentive mechanism to motivate vehicles to share their computation resources with service requesters. A practical asymmetric information scenario where the service requesters are not aware of the private information of vehicles is considered. The optimal contracts are derived to maximize the service requesters' expected utility as well as social welfare. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism is more effective and efficient than the traditional schemes.

By integrating Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) into vehicular networks, vehicular edge computing extends computing capability to the vehicular network edge and hosts services in close proximity of connected vehicles. Parked Vehicles (PVs) occupy a large portion of the global vehicle and have idle states and resources. They collaborate with the MEC servers for cooperative task processing. This gives rise to a new computing paradigm, called by Collaborative Vehicular Edge Computing (CVEC). In CVEC, we introduce an offloading service provider that deploys an MEC server and schedules PVs on demand to handle offloading tasks. Efficient workload allocation and user-centric utility maximization are studied to optimize the network-wide task scheduling. In dynamic environment, offloading destination of each task is determined in a probabilistic manner. When necessary, the offloading service provider represents an offloading user to design a contract based incentive mechanism for the PVs. Based on contract theory and prospect theory, we model the offloading user's subjective evaluations on the utility in computation offloading, and derive an optimal contract to maximize the subjective utility under information asymmetry. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme.

With the repaid development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), more available resources and energy-efficient optimizations in resources scheduling are exactly required for large-scale network implementation for sustainable development. We observe that parked vehicles (PVs) have rich and underutilized resources for task execution. By scheduling them as general computing nodes to undertake computation tasks, we introduce a new computing paradigm, named by Parked Vehicular Computing (PVC). There exists some challenging issues to be addressed for the facilitation of PVC. In particular, an incentive mechanism is needed to offer optimized reward for PVs with the consideration of their parking time and energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate an energy-efficient PVC paradigm, and we design a contract-based incentive mechanism to motivate PVs to contribute their idle on-board resources. The PVs are classified into different types according to their parking time. Then, the designed contracts are assigned to different types of PVs. To realize the incentive mechanism, the optimization problem with the contract design is formulated to maximize the utility of the service provider. For optimal contract design, we solve the simplified problem by using Lagrangian multiplier method. Numerical results indicate that the proposed PVC with optimal contract design outperforms existing work in improving social welfare of resource scheduling, which takes quality-of-service and overall energy consumption into consideration. We also demonstrate that the contract-based incentive mechanism is energy-efficient and effective.