With the developments of communication technologies and smart manufacturing, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged. Software-defined networking (SDN), a promising paradigm shift, has provided a viable way to manage IIoT dynamically, called software-defined industrial Internet of Things (SDIIoT). In SDIIoT, lots of data and flows are generated by industrial devices, where a physically distributed but logically centralized control plane is necessary. However, one of the most intractable problems is how to reach consensus among multiple controllers under complex industrial environments. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based consensus protocol in SDIIoT, along with detailed consensus steps and theoretical analysis, where blockchain works as a trusted third party to collect and synchronize network-wide views between different SDN controllers. Specially, it is a permissioned blockchain. In order to improve the throughput of this blockchain-based SDIIoT, we jointly consider the trust features of blockchain nodes and controllers, as well as the computational capability of the blockchain system. Accordingly, we formulate view change, access selection, and computational resources allocation as a joint optimization problem. We describe this problem as a Markov decision process by defining state space, action space, and reward function. Due to the fact that it is difficult to solve this joint problem by traditional methods, we propose a novel dueling deep Q-learning approach. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Recently, the term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) has garnered great attention. As a trusted, dependable, and decentralized approach, blockchain has already been used in IoT. However, the existing blockchain has a number of drawbacks that prevent it from being used as a generic platform for IoT. The nodes in IoT are heavily resource-limited, especially computing and networking resources. Unfortunately, they are necessary for the blockchain to solve complicated puzzles and propagate blocks. In this paper, we propose agent mining and cloud mining approaches to solve the above problem in the blockchain-enabled IoT. To be specific, miners act as mining agents for nodes in IoT, offload mining tasks to cloud computing servers, and use networking resources dynamically. Furthermore, in order to enhance the performance, the access selection of users, computing resources allocation, and networking resources allocation are formulated as a joint optimization problem. We then propose a dueling deep reinforcement learning approach to address this problem. Numerical results justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

The advancement of 5G technology has brought the prosperous development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV services are not only computational intensive but also extremely sensitive to the delay. As a promising computing paradigm, mobile edge computing (MEC) can be applied to IoV scenarios. However, due to the limited resources of a single MEC server, it is difficult to cope with the suddenly increased computation loads caused by emergencies, or the intensive resource requests from busy regions. Therefore, we propose a novel regional intelligent management vehicular system with dual MEC planes, in which MEC servers in the same region cooperate with each other to achieve resource sharing. We classify computing tasks into different types according to their delay tolerances and focus on the optimization problem of resource allocation for different type tasks. And then, we design a resource allocation algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning, which can adapt to the changeable MEC environment to process high-dimensional data. Simulation results confirm that our proposed scheme is feasible and effective.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) network, IoT devices need to perform Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to make decisions according to specifical service requirement under dynamic environment. However, the generation and usage of AI model typically requires huge amount of communication, computing and caching resource. Thus, the construction of the network and the scheduling of the limited network resources to realize the rapid generation and propagation of AI models are critical. Therefore, we propose a software-defined Information Centric-Internet of Things architecture (ICIoT) to bring caching and computing capabilities to IoT network. Based on the proposed IC-IoT architecture, we design a jointly resource scheduling scheme to uniformly manage the computing and caching resources. The objective is to maximum the reward which consists not only short-term reward, but also long-term reward brought by caching popular AI models. The resource scheduling problem is formulated into a multidimensional optimization problem. A new deep Q-learning method is proposed due to the complexity and high dimension of this problem. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of software defined IC-IoT architecture and the joint resource allocation strategy.

To tackle a challenging energy efficiency problem caused by the growing mobile Internet traffic, this paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based green content task offloading scheme in cloud-edge-end cooperation networks. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a power minimization model, where requests arriving at a node for the same content can be aggregated in its queue and in-network caching is widely deployed in heterogeneous environments. A novel DRL algorithm is designed to minimize the power consumption by making collaborative caching and task offloading decisions in each slot on the basis of content request information in previous slots and current network state. Numerical results show that our proposed content task offloading model achieves better power efficiency than the existing popular counterparts in cloud-edge-end collaboration networks, and fast converges to the stable state.