The Internet of Things (IoT) has already emerged as one of the most popular directions in today’s information and communication technology (ICT) domain. With its advancement over different application areas, such as smart home, smart healthcare, industry 4.0, etc., a huge amount of data has been generated by billions of IoT devices, which aggravates the shortcomings of the network layer (IP)-based networks, such as limited expressiveness of IP addressing, inefficient support for mobility, and in-network caching. Building IoT on top of information-centric networking (ICN) is believed to be a promising solution to tackle the above challenge, especially the in-network caching of ICN can significantly benefit IoT in terms of reducing data and saving IoT devices’ energy. However, caching IoT data is more challenging than caching traditional Internet content, e.g., video, because IoT data are usually valid within a certain period of time, and IoT devices are typically constrained with battery. Hence, in this survey, we first review the current implementation proposals of ICN-based IoT (ICN-IoT). Next, we present the conventional caching decision policies and replacement policies which could be adopted to mitigate the aforementioned challenges, e.g., reducing IoT traffic, saving energy, and reducing data retrieval latency. Further, since leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques have the potential to further improve the caching efficiency by dealing with uncertainties, e.g., predicting unknown information, adaptively interacting with the environment, we also demonstrate the recently proposed ML-based caching schemes for ICN-IoT. In addition, we outline the open research issues and point out the future opportunities of caching in ICN-IoT.

The Intelligent Autonomous Transport System in 6G (6G-IATS) refers to the coordination of 6G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and intelligent transportation systems, which is expected to revolutionize future intelligent transportation systems. In 6G-IATS, large-scale traffic flow prediction, affiliated with time series prediction, holds significant value for transportation planning and urban management. As an emerging AI method, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged prominently in time series forecasting. Unfortunately, it is challenging to achieve accurate and efficient large-scale traffic flow prediction by LLMs in 6G-IATS, due to the two issues: a) these LLMs fail to capture the spatio-temporal correlations in a large-scale road network, leading to limited prediction accuracy, and b) they process a substantial amount of training data on the central server, which imposes low training efficiency. Jointly considering the two concerns, this paper proposes a novel LLM and edge computing-based architecture for large-scale traffic flow prediction in 6G-IATS, called Spatio-Temporal Generative Large Language Model on Edge (STGLLM-E). In this architecture, we first decompose the entire large-scale road network into several subgraphs. To capture the spatio-temporal correlations, an LLM-based method named Spatio-Temporal Generative Large Language Model (STGLLM) including Spatio-Temporal Module (STM) and Generative Large Language Model (GLLM) is proposed. Secondly, to improve the training efficiency of the STGLLM-E, an edge training strategy based on edge servers is devised. Experiments are conducted on two real-world traffic flow datasets. The experimental results illustrate that the STGLLM-E is superior to the baselines in the prediction accuracy and the efficiency of training.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is becoming increasingly important in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). At the same time, large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) are gradually playing significant roles in the IoV. Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) are models capable of integrating multiple modalities of information, enhancing the environmental perception capabilities of the IoV. GenAI can generate highly complex virtual driving scenarios, which are used to test and optimize intelligent driving algorithms, reducing the risks and costs of real-world road testing. Embodied AI can interact with the environment and make decisions, and can learn in the simulated environments that are provided by GenAI. To address issues like low correlation of multimodal data, high-uncertainty of driving environment, and insufficient intelligence in the IoV, this article proposes a perception and decision-making system empowered by embodied AI. First, we utilize a transformer to achieve multimodal data fusion integrated with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data. Second, the MLLM analyzes the situation based on driving intentions, communication conditions, and the perceived environmental expressions. Finally, the MLLM makes the optimal decisions and adjustments based on the analysis. The experimental results show that the integration of V2V enables the IoV to more comprehensively perceive a complex driving environment. The MLLM can empower the IoV to make accurate decisions in high-uncertainty scenarios, significantly improving route completion rates.

Cross-modal communications that incorporate audio-visual and tactile signals will bring a more holistic immersive experience to people. However, due to the different transmission requirements of these signals, it is a challenging task to rationalize the allocation of transmission resources. Therefore, this work proposes a joint transmission scheme to deal with the resource allocation problem of diverse signals. Network slicing and puncturing architecture are introduced in the scheme to achieve flexible resource allocation and reduce the wasting of resources. To reduce the negative impact of puncturing transmission on users, we construct the optimization problem related to transmission rate and reliability. This problem can realize the reasonable allocation of radio resources and meet the transmission requirements of the two types of signals. Next, we divide the optimization problem into two parts: video traffic resources allocation and tactile traffic puncturing resources allocation. To solve both of the problems, we leverage the channel matching (CM) algorithm and puncturing resource allocation (PRA) algorithm. In addition, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both ways to occupy puncturing resources, namely, occupy resources proportionally (ORP) and occupy resources blocks for transmission (ORB). Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by comparing the excepted rate and resources loss ratio of system users with different schemes.

The evolution from fifth-generation mobile communications (5G) to beyond 5G (B5G) will lead to more ubiquitous and smarter paradigms in the Internet of Things (IoT). Communication will shift from the classical information theory to a semantic communication (SemCom) paradigm driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the capacity and optimize resources. Image SemCom (ISC) will empower IoT applications, such as drone image acquisition. However, ISC requires suitable devices and sufficient computing resources to support complex neural network models, posing a significant challenge. To address this, we propose a federated semantic feature distillation (FedSFD) architecture to improve the global performance of ISC by combining federated learning (FL) and feature distillation (FD) for the feature knowledge transfer. First, lightweight IoT device models in the edge group and the powerful server model alternately minimize losses to update parameters. After learning middle-layer features of all the edge models, the server can guide the individual device models. Second, we incorporate the information bottleneck (IB) concept into the design of loss functions to balance compression and reconstruction. Third, focusing on the tradeoff between the local training and knowledge interaction, FedSFD achieves image semantic reconstruction without sharing the private data, ensuring personalization and privacy protection in the FL framework. Finally, compared to the baseline, the simulation experiments show that the proposed approach achieves better ISC reconstruction and noise robustness during group ISC.