Current fifth-generation (5G) networks do not cover maritime areas, causing difficulties in developing maritime Internet of Things (IoT). To tackle this problem, we establish a nearshore network by collaboratively using on-shore terrestrial base stations (TBSs) and tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These TBSs and UAVs form virtual clusters in a user-centric manner. Within each virtual cluster, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is adopted for agilely including various maritime IoT devices, which are sparsely distributed over the vast ocean. The nearshore network also shares the spectrum with marine satellites. In such a NOMA-based hybrid satellite-UAV-terrestrial network, interference among different network segments, different clusters, and different users occurs. We thereby formulate a joint power allocation problem to maximize the sum rate of the network. Different from existing studies, we use large-scale channel state information (CSI) only for optimization to reduce system overhead. The large-scale CSI is obtained by using the position information of maritime IoT devices. The problem is non-convex with intractable non-linear constraints. We tackle these difficulties by adopting max-min optimization, the auxiliary function method, and the successive convex approximation technique. An iterative power allocation algorithm is accordingly proposed, which is shown to be effective for coverage enhancement by simulations. This shows the potential of NOMA-based hybrid satellite-UAV-terrestrial networks for maritime on-demand coverage.

Federated learning (FL) is promising in enabling large-scale model training by massive devices without exposing their local datasets. However, due to limited wireless resources, traditional cloud-based FL system suffers from the bottleneck of communication overhead in core network. Fueled by this issue, we consider a hierarchical FL system and formulate a joint problem of edge aggregation interval control and resource allocation to minimize the weighted sum of training loss and training latency. To quantify the learning performance, an upper bound of the average global gradient deviation, in terms of the edge aggregation interval, the training latency, and the number of successfully participating devices, is derived. Then an alternative problem is formulated, which can be decoupled into an edge aggregation interval control problem and a resource allocation problem, and solved by an iterative optimization algorithm. Specifically, given the resource allocation strategy, a relaxation and rounding method is proposed to optimize the edge aggregation interval. The problem of resource allocation including training time allocation and bandwidth allocation is solved separately based on the convex optimization theory. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, compared to the benchmarks, can achieve higher learning performance with lower training latency, and is capable of adaptively adjusting the edge aggregation interval and the resource allocation strategy according to the training process.

Semantic communication in the 6G era has been deemed a promising communication paradigm to break through the bottleneck of traditional communications. However, its applications for the multi-user scenario, especially the broadcasting case, remain under-explored. To effectively exploit the benefits enabled by semantic communication, in this paper, we propose a one-to-many semantic communication system. Specifically, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) enabled semantic communication system called MR DeepSC. By leveraging semantic features for different users, a semantic recognizer based on the pre-trained model, i.e., DistilBERT, is built to distinguish different users. Furthermore, the transfer learning is adopted to speed up the training of new receiver networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MR_DeepSC can achieve the best performance in terms of BLEU score than the other benchmarks under different channel conditions, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for computation-intensive and delay-critical applications supported by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, the computational resources at MEC servers are normally much smaller compared with the remote cloud server (CS). To handle the ever-increasing IoT devices and applications, the collaborative edge and cloud computing should be jointly exploited. Further, with finite block length (FBL) utilized in URLLC-supported networks, the coding error probability cannot be ignored. On these grounds, this paper investigates the dynamic offloading of FBL packets in an edge-cloud collaborative MEC system consisting of multi-mobile IoT devices (MIDs) with energy harvesting (EH), multi-edge servers, and one CS in a dynamic environment. The optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average long-term service cost defined as the weighted sum of MID energy consumption and service delay (including the uploading transmission delay, the handover cost, and the execution delay for the partial offloaded part, the local execution delay for the local processing part), with the constraints of the available resource, the energy causality, the allowable service delay, and the maximum decoding error probability. To address the problem involving both discrete and continuous variables, we propose a multi-device hybrid decision-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) solution, named DDPG-D3QN algorithm, where the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and dueling double deep Q networks (D3QN) are invoked to tackle continuous and discrete action domains, respectively. Specifically, we improve the actor-critic structure of DDPG by combining D3QN. It utilizes the actor part of DDPG to search for the optimal offloading rate and power control of local execution. Meanwhile, it combines the critic part of DDPG with D3QN to select the optimal server for offloading. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed DDPG-D3QN algorithm has better stability and faster convergence while achieving higher rewards than the existing DRL-based methods. Furthermore, the edge-cloud collaboration has been proven to attain improved performance when compared with other offloading schemes with no collaboration between edge and cloud.

Cloud computing built on virtualization technologies can provide Internet service providers (SPs) with elastic virtualized node and link resources. SPs can outsource their virtualized resources as customized virtual networks (VNs) to end users. Hence, how to efficiently embed these VNs is the core issue in virtualization research. This technical issue is virtual network embedding (VNE). Since the issue inception, multiple mapping algorithms have been studied, including the reinforcement learning (RL) approach of machine learning. However, prior mapping algorithms are mostly static. Existing dynamic mapping algorithms just focus on accepting as many VNs as possible. No existing dynamic algorithm considers optimizing the quality of service (QoS) performance of each accepted VN. Optimizing the VN QoS performance is beneficial to guaranteeing service quality in cloud computing environment. On these backgrounds, we jointly investigate the dynamic VN embedding and optimize the QoS performance of each accepted VN. A dynamic heuristic algorithm is proposed in order to be evaluated in continuous time. When one VN service is requested, the VN will be mapped by the dynamic heuristic algorithm. If the QoS demand of the VN is not guaranteed, the re-embedding scheme of the heuristic algorithm will be driven. Certain virtual elements of the VN will be adjusted. The dynamic embedding algorithm ensures flexible VN assignment and fulfills customized QoS demands. Finally, simulation results are illustrated in order to validate the strength of our dynamic algorithm. We perform the comparison with multiple existing dynamic algorithms. For instance, VN acceptance ratio of our dynamic heuristic algorithm improves at least 13%.