An intelligent transportation system (ITS) plays an important role in public transport management, security and other issues. Traffic flow detection is an important part of the ITS. Based on the real-time acquisition of urban road traffic flow information, an ITS provides intelligent guidance for relieving traffic jams and reducing environmental pollution. The traffic flow detection in an ITS usually adopts the cloud computing mode. The edge of the network will transmit all the captured video to the cloud computing center. However, the increasing traffic monitoring has brought great challenges to the storage, communication and processing of traditional transportation systems based on cloud computing. To address this issue, a traffic flow detection scheme based on deep learning on the edge node is proposed in this article. First, we propose a vehicle detection algorithm based on the YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once) model trained with a great volume of traffic data. We pruned the model to ensure its efficiency on the edge equipment. After that, the DeepSORT (Deep Simple Online and Realtime Tracking) algorithm is optimized by retraining the feature extractor for multiobject vehicle tracking. Then, we propose a real-time vehicle tracking counter for vehicles that combines the vehicle detection and vehicle tracking algorithms to realize the detection of traffic flow. Finally, the vehicle detection network and multiple-object tracking network are migrated and deployed on the edge device Jetson TX2 platform, and we verify the correctness and efficiency of our framework. The test results indicate that our model can efficiently detect the traffic flow with an average processing speed of 37.9 FPS (frames per second) and an average accuracy of 92.0% on the edge device.

The sixth-generation network (6G) is expected to achieve a fully connected world, which makes full use of a large amount of sensitive data. Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed computing paradigm. In Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC), FL is used to protect consumer data privacy. However, using FL in VEC will lead to expensive communication overheads, thereby occupying regular communication resources. In the traditional FL, the massive communication rounds before convergence lead to enormous communication costs. Furthermore, in each communication round, many clients upload large quantity model parameters to the parameter server in the uplink communication phase, which increases communication overheads. Moreover, a few straggler links and clients may prolong training time in each round, which will decrease the efficiency of FL and potentially increase the communication costs. In this work, we propose an efficient-communication approach, which consists of three parts, including “Customized”, “Partial”, and “Flexible”, known as FedCPF. FedCPF provides a customized local training strategy for vehicular clients to achieve convergence quickly through a constraint item within fewer communication rounds. Moreover, considering the uplink congestion, we introduce a partial client participation rule to avoid numerous vehicles uploading their updates simultaneously. Besides, regarding the diverse finishing time points of federated training, we present a flexible aggregation policy for valid updates by constraining the upload time. Experimental results show that FedCPF outperforms the traditional FedAVG algorithm in terms of testing accuracy and communication optimization in various FL settings. Compared with the baseline, FedCPF achieves efficient communication with faster convergence speed and improves test accuracy by 6.31% on average. In addition, the average communication optimization rate is improved by 2.15 times.