6G is envisioned to empower wireless communication and computation through the digitalization and connectivity of everything, by establishing a digital representation of the real network environment. Mobile edge computing (MEC), as one of the key enabling factors, meets unprecedented challenges during mobile offloading due to the extremely complicated and unpredictable network environment in 6G. The existing works on offloading in MEC mainly ignore the effects of user mobility and the unpredictable MEC environment. In this paper, we present a new vision of Digital Twin Edge Networks (DITEN) where digital twins (DTs) of edge servers estimate edge servers' states and DT of the entire MEC system provides training data for offloading decision. A mobile offloading scheme is proposed in DITEN to minimize the offloading latency under the constraints of accumulated consumed service migration cost during user mobility. The Lyapunov optimization method is leveraged to simplify the long-term migration cost constraint to a multiobjective dynamic optimization problem, which is then solved by Actor-Critic deep reinforcement learning. Simulations results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the average offloading latency, the offloading failure rate, and the service migration rate, as compared with benchmark schemes, while saving the system cost with DT assistance.
25 March 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
The aim of this paper is to enhance the performance of an integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system in the multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink in which a two-dimensional (2D) fluid antenna system (FAS) with multiple activated ports is employed at the base station (BS) to maximize the sum-rate of the downlink users subject to a sensing constraint. The unique feature of this setup is that the locations of the antenna ports at the FAS can be optimized jointly with the precoding design to achieve a higher sum-rate. The required optimization problem is however NP-hard. To overcome this, we start by considering the perfect channel state information (CSI) scenario where all the port CSI is available. Deep reinforcement learning is utilized to build an end-to-end learning framework for the joint optimization problem. In particular, by fixing the activated ports, we adopt a primal-dual based learning algorithm to design a constraint-aware neural network for optimizing the ISAC precoder. Then, by using the neural precoding network to calculate the reward, we adopt the deep reinforcement learning algorithm to design the port selection and precoder jointly. An advantage actor and critic (A2C) algorithm is proposed to train the policy, in which the actor network uses the pointer network to learn the stochastic policy and the critic network adopts the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) encoder architecture to learn the expected reward from the observations. Afterwards, the partial CSI case is addressed, where we propose a masked autoencoder (MAE) induced channel extrapolation for predicting all the CSI to facilitate the joint design. Simulation results demonstrate the promising performance of using FAS for multiuser MIMO and also validate the proposed learning-based scheme.
13 July 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Mobile edge computing (MEC) yields significant paradigm shift in industrial Internet of things (IIoT), by bringing resource-rich data center near to the lightweight IIoT mobile devices (MDs). In MEC, resource allocation and network economics need to be jointly addressed to maximize system efficiency and incentivize price-driven agents, whereas this joint problem is under the locality constraints, i.e., an edge server can only serve multiple IIoT MDs in the vicinity constrained by its limited computing resource. In this paper, we investigate the joint problem of network economics and resource allocation in MEC where IIoT MDs request offloading with claimed bids and edge servers provide their limited computing service with ask prices. Particularly, we propose two double auction schemes with dynamic pricing in MEC, namely a breakeven-based double auction (BDA) and a more efficient dynamic pricing based double auction (DPDA), to determine the matched pairs between IIoT MDs and edge servers, as well as the pricing mechanisms for high system efficiency, under the locality constraints. Through theoretical analysis, both algorithms are proved to be budget-balanced, individual profit, system efficient, and truthful. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms and the simulation results indicate that the proposed DPDA and BDA can significantly improve the system efficiency of MEC in IIoT.
12 January 2018 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal
The widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT), especially smart wearables, will play an important role in improving the quality of medical care, bringing convenience for patients and improving the management level of hospitals. However, due to the limitation of communication protocols, there exists non unified architecture that can connect all intelligent things in smart hospitals, which is made possible by the emergence of the Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). In light of this, we propose an architecture to connect intelligent things in smart hospitals based on NB-IoT, and introduce edge computing to deal with the requirement of latency in medical process. As a case study, we develop an infusion monitoring system to monitor the real-time drop rate and the volume of remaining drug during the intravenous infusion. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions for building a smart hospital by connecting intelligent things.
30 December 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
The air-ground network provides users with seamless connections and real-time services, while its resource constraint triggers a paradigm shift from machine learning to federated learning. Federated learning enables clients to collaboratively train models without sharing data. Meanwhile, digital twins provide environmental awareness and autonomous management, which in combination with federated learning reconciles the conflict between privacy protection and data training in air-ground network. In this paper, we consider dynamic digital twin and federated learning for air-ground networks where drone works as the aggregator and the ground clients collaboratively train the model based on the network dynamics captured by digital twins. We design incentives for federated learning based on Stackelberg game, in which the digital twin of the drone acts as the leader to set preferences for clients, and clients as followers choose the global training rounds after weighing benefits and costs. Furthermore, considering the varying digital twin deviations and network dynamics during the federated learning process, we design a dynamic incentive scheme to adaptively adjust the selection of the optimal clients and their participation level. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes can significantly improve accuracy and energy efficiency.
2 November 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) greatly improves the traffic environment and life efficiency using messages shared between vehicles. However, due to its complex network structure and high mobility, the messages shared between vehicles are not always reliable. To this, we propose a trust management system of IoV based on blockchain, which formalizes a complete vehicle reputation value calculation scheme to deal with the problem of calculating the credibility of messages. The proposed scheme can detect vehicles that send malicious messages and reduce their reputation values for punishing according to the rating mechanism. In addition, we design a blockchain-based data storage system that can prevent attackers from tampering with the reputation values stored in roadside units (RSUs). In view of the lack of calculation basis when roadside units verify the block, we also store the rating list it. Finally, we use the consensus mechanism that combines PoW and PoS to ensure that vehicles with a large change in reputation can be updated to the blockchain first. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has an obvious limitation on malicious vehicles, and improves the accuracy of the vehicles' judgment of events based on the received messages.