The rapid growth of intelligent sensing capabilities and super computation power in 6G mobile communication systems has facilitated their application in diverse domains such as smart health, smart factories, and the industrial Internet of Things. Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), as a core technology, has merged with artificial intelligence (AI) to enable intelligent connectivity, leading to a paradigm shift in traditional communication modes. This paper presents a visionary design for an ISAC-oriented unified IoT architecture that integrates software-defined communication and super-intelligent agents. By leveraging dynamic adaptability, self-learning, and optimization, the ISAC system can intelligently and flexibly respond to evolving requirements and environments. The architecture is redefined into three layers: the hardware layer, the omniscient layer, and the application layer. Furthermore, a retrospective survey of ISAC technology development over the past decade is conducted, highlighting new design principles for AI-empowered networks and multi-modals that support “intelligent connectivity" across various application scenarios and reinforce the security of ISAC. This paper categorizes the related works according to the different layer structures of the proposed architecture, and some important physical and machine learning models are introduced. Additionally, we summarize the current technological bottlenecks associated with ISAC and propose future research directions and potential solutions that lay the foundation for the future development of secure and intelligent communication networks.

Software defined Internet of Vehicles (SD-IoV) is an emerging paradigm for accomplishing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Unfortunately, SD-IoV still faces security challenges. Traditional solutions respond after attacks happening, which is low-effective. To cope with this problem, moving target defense (MTD) was proposed to modify network configurations dynamically. However, current MTD for IIoT has several drawbacks: 1) it cannot handle highly dynamic environments; 2) MTD strategy lacks intelligence because it needs attack–defense models; 3) they are difficult to trace sources. In this article, we propose an intelligent MTD scheme to defend against distributed denial-of-service in SD-IoV. Firstly, we model the configuration mutation of roadside units as a Markov decision process (MDP), and adopt deep reinforcement learning to solve the optimal configuration. Next, we evaluate the trust of vehicles after shuffling, which can distinguish spy vehicles. Finally, extensive simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our solution compared with representative methods.

With rapid development of emerging technologies for Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins (DT) have been proposed to support a wide variety of applications. A mobile network is expected to be integrated with DT to form a DT mobile network (DTMN). Unfortunately, DTMN still faces security threats, which have attracted great research attention. Current defense mechanisms are mostly static, i.e., responding after attacks happening. To solve the aforementioned problem, moving target defense (MTD) has been proposed as an innovative solution. However, there exist three major challenges when applying MTD into DTMN. Firstly, less emphasis was paid to collaborative scheduling between multiple MTD schemes, which can improve the security of DTMN. Secondly, MTD schemes require lots of network resources, but few works focus on the time allocation of multiple MTD schemes to reduce network resource consumption. Thirdly, existing defense strategies only rely on current information, but do not consider future information. In this paper, we propose a collaborative mutation-based MTD (CM-MTD) in DTMN. We mainly consider two MTD schemes called host address mutation (HAM) and route mutation (RM), respectively, which adjust network properties and invalidate different stages of cyber kill chain. We firstly formulate a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) to model time-varying security events and dynamic deployment of multiple MTD schemes. Then, security events are predicted by long short-term memory (LSTM), which are regarded as network states in SMDP. Next, infeasible actions that do not satisfy network constraints will be removed from the action space of the SMDP. Lastly, we design a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning algorithm for collaborative scheduling. Simulation results highlight the effectiveness of CM-MTD compared with baseline solutions.

With the explosive growth of Internet traffic, large sensitive and valuable information is at risk of cyber attacks, which are mostly preceded by network reconnaissance. A moving target defense technique called host address mutation (HAM) helps facing network reconnaissance. However, there still exist several fundamental problems in HAM: 1) current approaches cannot be self-adaptive to adversarial strategies. 2) network state is time-varying because each host decides whether to mutate IP address. 3) most methods mainly focus on enhancing security, but ignore the survivability of existing connections. In this paper, an Intelligence-Driven Host Address Mutation (ID-HAM) scheme is proposed to address aforementioned challenges. We firstly model a Markov decision process (MDP) to describe the mutation process, and design a seamless mutation mechanism. Secondly, to remove infeasible actions from the action space of MDP, we formulate address-to-host assignments as a constrained satisfaction problem. Thirdly, we design an advantage actor-critic algorithm for HAM, which aims to learn from scanning behaviors. Finally, security analysis and extensive simulations highlight the effectiveness of ID-HAM. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, ID-HAM can decrease maximum 25% times of scanning hits while only influencing communication slightly. We also implemented a proof-of-concept prototype system to conduct experiments with multiple scanning tools.

Federated learning (FL) opens a new promising paradigm for the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) since it can collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing private data. However, deploying FL frameworks in real IoT scenarios faces three critical challenges, i.e., statistical heterogeneity, resource constraint, and fairness. To address these challenges, we design a fair and efficient FL method, termed FedASA, which can address the challenge of statistical heterogeneity in resource-constrained scenarios by determining the shared architecture adaptively. In FedASA, we first present a cell-wised shared architecture selection strategy, which can adaptively construct the shared architecture for each device. We then design a cell-based aggregation algorithm for aggregating heterogeneous shared architectures. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of the federated error bound, which provides a theoretical guarantee for the fairness. At the same time, we prove the convergence of FedASA at the first-order stationary point. We evaluate the performance of FedASA through extensive simulation and experiments. Experimental results in cross-location scenarios show that FedASA outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches, improving accuracy by up to 13.27% with better fairness and faster convergence and communication requirement has been reduced by 81.49%.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of resource adaptation for diversified service requirements in the industrial Internet of things (IIoT). An intelligent resource adaptation scheme is designed to integrate scheduling of computing and networking resources, and make task offloading decisions, thereby satisfying the diversified requirements within IIoT. To provide the necessary integrating resource support for different requirements, we first introduce a cloud-edge-end collaborative IIoT architecture that leverages rich resources and global coverage of cloud computing, combined with the real-time processing capabilities and low network resource consumption of edge and local computing. To obtain an optimal resource adaptation strategy, we formulate an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the system’s long-term key quality indicator (KQI). Due to the coupled constraints among resource adaptation decisions, it is difficult to solve this problem directly. Additionally, diversified service requirements and dynamic network conditions of IIoT increase the complexity of finding solutions. Thus, we reformulate the formulated problem as a joint optimization problem involving task offloading and resource allocation. Then, we transform the joint optimization problem into a Markov decision process (MDP) and propose a KQI-oriented deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm for task offloading and integrated resource scheduling (KODDQN). This algorithm intelligently handles the diversified service requirements by sensing key information, such as the state of computing and networking resources within the IIoT. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the system’s long-term KQI by 2% compared to classical DDQN-based schemes.