With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the wide penetration of wireless networks, the surging demand for data communications and computing calls for the emerging edge computing paradigm. By moving the services and functions located in the cloud to the proximity of users, edge computing can provide powerful communication, storage, networking, and communication capacity. The resource scheduling in edge computing, which is the key to the success of edge computing systems, has attracted increasing research interests. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art research findings to know the research progress in this field. Specifically, we present the architecture of edge computing, under which different collaborative manners for resource scheduling are discussed. Particularly, we introduce a unified model before summarizing the current works on resource scheduling from three research issues, including computation offloading, resource allocation, and resource provisioning. Based on two modes of operation, i.e., centralized and distributed modes, different techniques for resource scheduling are discussed and compared. Also, we summarize the main performance indicators based on the surveyed literature. To shed light on the significance of resource scheduling in real-world scenarios, we discuss several typical application scenarios involved in the research of resource scheduling in edge computing. Finally, we highlight some open research challenges yet to be addressed and outline several open issues as the future research direction.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), there are a dramatically increasing number of devices, leading to the fact that only using terrestrial infrastructure can hardly provide high-quality services to all devices. Due to their flexibility, maneuverability, and economy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used to improve the performance of IoT networks. UAVs can not only provide wireless access to IoT devices in the absence of a terrestrial network but can also perform rich IoT services and applications, such as video surveillance, cargo transportation, pesticide spraying, and so forth. However, due to the high complexity, dynamics, and heterogeneity of the UAV-assisted IoT networks, growing attention has focused on using artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods to optimize, schedule, and orchestrate UAV-assisted IoT networks. In this article, we comprehensively analyze the impact of applying advanced AI architectures, models, and methods to different aspects of UAV-assisted IoT networks, including key IoT technologies, tasks, and applications. In addition, this article also explores challenges and discusses potential research directions of AI-enabled UAV-assisted IoT networks.

Capacity of vehicular networks with infrastructure support is both an interesting and challenging problem as the capacity is determined by the inter-play of multiple factors including vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, density and mobility of vehicles, and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a typical delay-tolerant application scenario with a subset of vehicles, termed Vehicles of Interest (VoIs), having download requests. Each VoI downloads a distinct large-size file from the Internet and other vehicles without download requests assist the delivery of the files to the VoIs. A cooperative communication strategy is proposed that explores the combined use of V2I communications, V2V communications, mobility of vehicles and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure to improve the capacity of vehicular networks. An analytical framework is developed to model the data dissemination process using this strategy, and a closed form expression of the achievable capacity is obtained, which reveals the relationship between the capacity and its major performance-impacting parameters such as inter-infrastructure distance, radio ranges of infrastructure and vehicles, sensing range of vehicles, transmission rates of V2I and V2V communications, vehicular density and proportion of VoIs. Numerical result shows that the proposed cooperative communication strategy significantly boosts the capacity of vehicular networks, especially when the proportion of VoIs is low. Our results provide guidance on the optimum deployment of vehicular network infrastructure and the design of cooperative communication strategy to improve the capacity.

The virtual world created by the development of the Internet, computers, artificial intelligence (AI), and hardware technologies have brought various degrees of digital transformation to people’s lives. With multiple demands for virtual reality increasing, the metaverse, a new type of social ecology that can connect the physical and virtual worlds, is booming. However, with the rapid growth of data volume and value, the continuous evolution of the metaverse faces the demands and challenges of privacy, security, high synchronization, and low latency. Fortunately, the ever-evolving blockchain and intelligent networking technologies can be used to satisfy the trusted construction, continuous data interaction, and computing demands of the metaverse. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct an in-depth review of the role and gains of blockchain, intelligent networking, and the combination of both in providing the immersive experiences of the metaverse. In this survey, we first discuss the development trend, characteristics, and architecture of the metaverse. Then, the existing work on blockchain, networking, and the combination of the two technologies are reviewed, including overviews, applications, and challenges. Next, applications of the metaverse are summarized, emphasizing the importance of the metaverse and the fields of development. Finally, we discuss some open issues, challenges, and future research directions.

The development of autonomous driving poses significant demands on computing resource, which is challenging to resource-constrained vehicles. To alleviate the issue, Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has been developed to offload real-time computation tasks from vehicles. However, with multiple vehicles contending for the communication and computation resources at the same time for different applications, how to efficiently schedule the edge resources toward maximal system welfare represents a fundamental issue in VEC. This article aims to provide a detailed analysis on the delay and cost of computation offloading for VEC and minimize the delay and cost from the perspective of multi-objective optimization. Specifically, we first establish an offloading framework with communication and computation for VEC, where computation tasks with different requirements for computation capability are considered. To pursue a comprehensive performance improvement during computation offloading, we then formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize both the delay and cost by jointly considering the offloading decision, allocation of communication and computation resources. By applying the game theoretic analysis, we propose a particle swarm optimization based computation offloading (PSOCO) algorithm to obtain the Pareto-optimal solutions to the multi-objective optimization problem. Extensive simulation results verify that our proposed PSOCO outperforms counterparts. Based on the results, we also present a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the relationship between delay and cost among the Pareto-optimal solutions.

Autonomous braking through vehicle precise decision-making and control to reduce accidents is a key issue, especially in the early diffusion phase of autonomous vehicle development. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based autonomous braking decision-making strategy in an emergency situation. Three key influencing factors, including efficiency, accuracy and passengers' comfort, are fully considered and satisfied by the proposed strategy. First, the vehicle lane-changing process and the braking process are analyzed in detail, which include the critical factors in the design of the autonomous braking strategy. Second, we propose a DRL process that determines the optimal strategy for autonomous braking. Particularly, a multi-objective reward function is designed, which can compromise the rewards achieved of different brake moments, the degree of the accident, and the comfort of the passenger. Third, a typical actor-critic (AC) algorithm named deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is adopted for solving the autonomous braking problem, which can improve the efficiency of the optimal strategy and be stable in continuous control tasks. Once the strategy is well trained, the vehicle can automatically take optimal braking behavior in an emergency to improve driving safety. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal in terms of learning effectiveness, decision-making accuracy and driving safety.