Cyber-physical Internet of things system (CPIoTS), as an evolution of Internet of things (IoT), plays a significant role in industrial area to support the interoperability and interaction of various machines (e.g. sensors, actuators, and controllers) by providing seamless connectivity with low bandwidth requirement. The fifth generation (5G) is a key enabling technology to revolutionize the future of industrial CPIoTS. In this paper, a communication framework based on 5G is presented to support the deployment of CPIoTS with a central controller. Based on this framework, multiple sensors and actuators can exchange information with the central controller in full-duplex mode. To accommodate the signal data in the available channel band, a resource allocation problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-convex programming problem, aiming to maximize the sum energy efficiency of CPIoTS. By introducing the transformation, we decompose the resource allocation problem into power allocation and channel allocation. Moreover, we consider an energy-efficient power allocation algorithm based on game theory and Dinkelbach's algorithm. Finally, to reduce the computational complexity, the channel allocation is modeled as a 3-dimensional matching problem, and solved by iterative Hungarian method with virtual devices (IHM-VD). A comparison is completed with well-known existing algorithms to demonstrate the performance of the proposed one. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed model, which significantly outperforms other benchmark algorithms in terms of meeting the energy efficiency and the QoS requirements.

Edge computing (EC) extends the ability of cloud computing to the network edge to support diverse resource-sensitive and performance-sensitive IoT applications. However, due to the limited capacity of edge servers (ESs) and the dynamic computing requirements, the system needs to dynamically update the task allocation policy according to real-time system states. Service migration is essential to ensure service continuity when implementing dynamic task allocation. Therefore, this article investigates the long-term dynamic task allocation and service migration (DTASM) problem in edge-cloud IoT systems where users’ computing requirements and mobility change over time. The DTASM problem is formulated to achieve the long-term performance of minimizing the load forwarded to the cloud while fulfilling the seamless migration constraint and the latency constraint at each time of implementing the DTASM decision. First, the DTASM problem is divided into two subproblems: 1) the user selection problem on each ES and 2) the system task allocation problem. Then, the DTASM problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) and an approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed. To tackle the challenge of vast discrete action spaces for DTASM task allocation in the system with a mass of IoT users, a training architecture based on the twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is employed. Meanwhile, each action is divided into a differentiable action for policy training and one mapped action for implementation in the IoT system. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DRL-based approach obtains the long-term optimal system performance compared to other benchmarks while satisfying seamless service migration.

Multi-modality image fusion provides more comprehensive and sophisticated information in modern medical diagnosis, remote sensing, video surveillance, etc. Traditional multi-scale transform (MST) based image fusion solutions have difficulties in the selection of decomposition level, and the contrast loss in fused image. At the same time, traditional sparse-representation based image fusion methods suffer the weak representation ability of fixed dictionary. In order to overcome these deficiencies of MST- and SR-based methods, this paper proposes an image fusion framework which integrates nonsubsampled contour transformation (NSCT) into sparse representation (SR). In this fusion framework, NSCT is applied to source images decomposition for obtaining corresponding low- and high-pass coefficients. It fuses low- and high-pass coefficients by using SR and Sum Modified-laplacian (SML) respectively. NSCT inversely transforms the fused coefficients to obtain the final fused image. In this framework, a principal component analysis (PCA) is implemented in dictionary training to reduce the dimension of learned dictionary and computation costs. A novel high-pass fusion rule based on SML is applied to suppress pseudo-Gibbs phenomena around singularities of fused image. Compared to three mainstream image fusion solutions, the proposed solution achieves better performance on structural similarity and detail preservation in fused images.

Omnidirectional image (OI) quality assessment is crucial to facilitate the development of virtual reality (VR) related technology. In this work, a distortion discrimination assisted multi-stream network is proposed for OI quality assessment. The multi-stream architecture is constructed by generating the viewport images received by the retina at one point to simulate the characteristics of humans perceiving VR contents. Additionally, the strategy of generating several viewport image sets from one OI is proposed for data augmentation. Furthermore, the facts that the human brain has the ability for both quality assessment and distortion type distinguishment, and the process of human brain handling two tasks exists information interaction inspire us to employ an auxiliary distortion discrimination task to facilitate the quality assessment task learning. Extensive experiments conducted on two public OI databases demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to both traditional 2D quality metrics and existing metrics specific for OIs. Moreover, utilizing the assistant task is proven to be more effective than the single task learning for OI quality evaluation. Better generalization performance is also verified to be another valuable trait of the proposed method.

In this paper, we consider a social-aware unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted mobile crowd sensing (MCS) system for disaster relief networks, and investigate how to recruit suitable UAVs to perform sensing tasks in stochastic and dynamic environments (both UAVs and tasks arrive stochastically). We formulate the task assignment problem into a dynamic matching problem, and propose a multiple-waitlist based task assignment (MWTA) algorithm to find the stable matching in time-varying environment. We prove that MWTA can achieve the dynamic stability containing the strategy-proofness, efficiency, and envy-freeness. Simulation results demonstrate the performance improvement of our proposed scheme compared with the traditional matching algorithm applied to deterministic matching model in stochastic setting.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring great benefits to users, operators, and manufactures in different application scenarios. Given that smart objects which can exploit their own social networks and share contents via device-to-device (D2D) communications, the combined social IoT promises to collect information as well as to provide services more efficiently. This application scenario requires lower latency and higher reliability, and then we adopt D2D-based caching to reduce the downloading latency while guaranteeing the reliable delivery. To achieve this joint optimization objective, we conceive the interdependence with the framework of hierarchical bipartite graph. In this way, this combinatorial problem can be decoupled into a content sharing problem and a resource allocation problem. To solve the first one, we propose a content sharing-oriented matching algorithm with projecting social characters onto physical links. To solve the second one, we formulate this resource allocation problem as equivalent to a many-to-one matching game with peer effect. We then design a novel distributed algorithm with rotation-swap, which can converge to a stable state with limited number of iterations. Formulating the convergence procedure as another NP-hard problem, we further design a coloring-based heuristic algorithm to find a near-optimal solution. We conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate that our proposed schemes can achieve a better trade-off between performance and complexity than other benchmarks.