With the rapid development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and mobile communication technologies, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to extend cloud computing and storage capabilities to the edge of cellular networks, near to IoT devices. MEC enables IoT devices with limited battery capacity and computation/storage capabilities to execute their computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications at the edge of the networks. However, to efficiently execute these applications in MEC systems, each task must be properly offloaded and scheduled onto the MEC servers. Additionally, the MEC servers may intelligently balance and share their computing resources to satisfy the application QoS and QoE. Therefore, effective resource allocation (RA) mechanisms in MEC are vital for ensuring its foreseen advantages. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) have emerged as key methods for many challenging aspects of MEC. Particularly, ML and DL play a crucial role in addressing the challenges of RA in MEC. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of ML/DL-based RA mechanisms in MEC. We first present tutorials that demonstrate the advantages of applying ML and DL in MEC. Then, we present enabling technologies for quickly running ML/DL training and inference in MEC. Afterward, we provide an in-depth survey of recent works that used ML/DL methods for RA in MEC from three aspects: (1) ML/DL-based methods for task offloading; (2) ML/DL-based methods for task scheduling; and (3) ML/DL-based methods for joint resource allocation. Finally, we discuss key challenges and future research directions of applying ML/DL for resource allocation in MEC networks.

Compared with traditional power systems, smart grid is designed to provide effective and secure energy services. Data aggregation is one of the key technologies in wireless sensor networks, which reduces the amount of data transmission between nodes by merging similar data and simplifying redundant data, thus significantly reducing the computation cost and communication overhead of the system. Many data aggregation schemes have been developed for the smart grid in the past years. However, most of the data aggregation schemes ignore the data security and privacy protection issues of the edge layer. To solve these problems, in this article, we propose an edge blockchain assisted lightweight privacy-preserving data aggregation for smart grid, named EBDA. In this work, we integrate edge computing and blockchain to design a three-layer architecture data aggregation scheme for smart grid. This new architecture supports a two-level data aggregation scheme, which is more efficient and secure. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, EBDA shows great superiority in terms of resisting network attacks, reducing system computation costs and communication overhead compared with existing schemes.

With the rapid growth of smartphones, mobile crowdsensing emerges as a new paradigm which takes advantage of the pervasive sensor-embedded smartphones to collect data efficiently. Many auction-based incentive mechanisms have been proposed to stimulate smartphone users to participate in the mobile crowdsensing applications and systems. However, none of them has taken into consideration both the bid privacy of smartphone users and the social cost. In this paper, we design two frameworks for privacypreserving auction-based incentive mechanisms that also achieve approximate social cost minimization. In the former, each user submits a bid for a set of tasks it is willing to perform; in the latter, each user submits a bid for each task in its task set. Both frameworks select users based on platform-defined score functions. As examples, we propose two score functions, linear and log functions, to realize the two frameworks. We rigorously prove that both proposed frameworks achieve computational efficiency, individual rationality, truthfulness, differential privacy, and approximate social cost minimization. In addition, with log score function, the two frameworks are asymptotically optimal in terms of the social cost. Extensive simulations evaluate the performance of the two frameworks and demonstrate that our frameworks achieve bid-privacy preservation although sacrificing social cost.

Mobile crowd sensing emerges as a new paradigm which takes advantage of the pervasive sensor-embedded smartphones to collect data. Many incentive mechanisms for mobile crowd sensing have been proposed. However, none of them takes into consideration the cooperative compatibility of users for multiple cooperative tasks. In this paper, we design truthful incentive mechanisms to minimize the social cost such that each of the cooperative tasks can be completed by a group of compatible users. We study two bid models and formulate the Social Optimization Compatible User Selection (SOCUS) problem for each model. We also define three compatibility models and use real-life relationships from social networks to model the compatibility relationships. We design two incentive mechanisms, $MCT - M$ and $MCT - S$ , for the compatibility cases. Both of $MCT - M$ and $MCT - S$ consist of two steps: compatible user grouping and reverse auction. We further present a user grouping method through neural network model and clustering algorithm. Through both rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms achieve computational efficiency, individual rationality and truthfulness. Moreover, $MCT - M$ can output the optimal solution. By using neural network and clustering algorithm for user grouping, the proposed incentive mechanisms can reduce the social cost and overpayment ratio further with less grouping time.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has such a profound impact that we have witnessed crowdsensing has emerged as the most popular sensing paradigm where participants sense and aggregate data to the platform by smart devices. However, the participants may not be willing to involve in data sensing and aggregation if they are not sufficiently compensated or their personalized private information are disclosed. In order to overcome the above issues, this paper proposes a payment-privacy protection level (PPL) game, where each participant submits his sensing data with a specified PPL while the platform chooses a corresponding payment to the participant. Additionally, we derive the Nash equilibrium (NE) point of the game. Considering that the payment-PPL model is unknown in practice, we employ a reinforcement learning technique, i.e., Q-learning to obtain the payment-PPL strategy in a dynamic payment-PPL game. We further use deep Q network (DQN), which combines a deep learning technique with Q-learning to accelerate learning speed. Through extensive simulations, we verify that our proposed algorithm using DQN achieves superior performance in terms of utilities of both platform and participants and data aggregation accuracy compared with the one using Q-learning.

The development of Electric Vehicle (EV) helps to ease energy crises and deduce vehicle exhaust emissions. However, it also brings a great impact on both transportation networks and power grids. There are some serious impediments in terms of energy charging to the popularization of EV, such as high deployment cost of charging stations, low charging efficiency, and voltage deviation of power grid. To address these issues, we design a new EV charging system, which levers the bus network in urban areas through the integration of OnLine Electric Vehicle (OLEV) system and Microwave Power Transfer (MPT) system. We formulate the EV route scheduling problem based on this new charging system to maximize the total residual energy subject to all EVs can arrive to their destinations before deadlines. Then, we propose an approximation algorithm, RSA, to solve the route scheduling problem. To relieve the traffic congestion, we further formulate the conflict-free EV route scheduling problem, and use the matching based algorithm, FRSA, to find the EV route schedules with the maximal residual energy. Through the extensive simulations, we demonstrate that RSA and FRSA can increase the average residual energy by 67.66% and 50.36% compared with the solution without the designed wireless charging system, respectively. Moreover, RSA reduces 22.22% of travel time and outputs 77.23% of residual energy, and FRSA can obtain 83.51% residual energy with 3.62% of extra travel time of the corresponding optimal solutions on average, respectively.