The applications of Internet of Things have emerged in every aspect of people’s life. The volume of data gathered can be enormous. Enterprises and personal consumers are increasingly reliant on cloud storage services instead of local storage. While they enjoy the convenience of cloud storage services, they also worry about the integrity of the cloud-stored data since they do not physically own the data. To enable public integrity auditing, third-party auditors as trusted ones verify data integrity on behalf of the data owner. However, the vulnerability of auditors should also be considered. We propose a consortium blockchain-based public integrity verification system (CBPIV). In CBPIV, the auditor behaviors are recorded in the consortium blockchain so that authorized parties can audit the auditor to see if the verification results are correct. A smart contract is deployed to check the behavior of the auditor automatically, which can trigger alerts for unusual behaviors. The evaluation on both security and performance shows that our proposed scheme is secure and alleviates the burden on data owners of limited computation capability.

In the area of agriculture and livestock management, the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a groundbreaking strategy to enhance operational efficiency and advance intelligent process management. However, this sector faces significant challenges, including ambiguity in product origins and limited regulatory oversight of IoT devices. This paper explores the innovative integration of blockchain technology within the agricultural and livestock IoT, highlighting how this convergence significantly enhances operational security and transparency. We provide an in-depth review of the latest applications and advancements of blockchain in these domains, offering a comprehensive analysis of the current state of technology and its implications. Furthermore, this paper discusses the potential future development trajectories in agricultural and livestock IoT, emphasizing blockchain’s role in addressing current challenges and shaping future innovations. The findings suggest that blockchain technology not only improves data security and trustworthiness but also opens new avenues for efficient and transparent management in agriculture and animal husbandry.

In the advanced 5G and beyond networks, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is increasingly recognized as a promising technology, offering the dual advantages of reducing energy utilization in cloud data centers while catering to the demands for reliability and real-time responsiveness in end devices. However, the inherent complexity and variability of MEC networks pose significant challenges in computational offloading decisions. To tackle this problem, we propose a proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based Device-to-Device (D2D)-assisted computation offloading and resource allocation scheme. We construct a realistic MEC network environment and develop a Markov decision process (MDP) model that minimizes time loss and energy consumption. The integration of a D2D communication-based offloading framework allows for collaborative task offloading between end devices and MEC servers, enhancing both resource utilization and computational efficiency. The MDP model is solved using the PPO algorithm in deep reinforcement learning to derive an optimal policy for offloading and resource allocation. Extensive comparative analysis with three benchmarked approaches has confirmed our scheme’s superior performance in latency, energy consumption, and algorithmic convergence, demonstrating its potential to improve MEC network operations in the context of emerging 5G and beyond technologies.

Autonomous driving technology has achieved remarkable advancements, offering substantial potential to revolutionize traffic safety and smart mobility. However, when faced with rare scenarios (weather, accident scenes, lighting), autonomous driving systems can still only play a limited role due to insufficient learning in these rare situations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) technologies to enhance the performance of pre-trained autonomous driving models in handling rare situations. Specifically, we firstly use LoRA to fine-tune the pre-trained model of autonomous driving to focus on capturing knowledge related to rare scenarios and enhance the model’s ability to handle rare situations. Furthermore, we introduce MoEs and propose local, global, and hybrid adaptive solutions to overcome LoRA’s fixed intrinsic rank limitation. These approaches enable adaptive adjustment of LoRA’s rank, and improve the model’s performance from both local and global perspectives. Lastly, we design detailed algorithms for different adaptation schemes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed solutions not only effectively improve the performance of the autonomous driving perception model in rare scenarios, but also maintain lower inference latency compared to baseline methods.

Semantic communication has gained significant attention in modern data-intensive applications due to its efficient information transmission capabilities. While recent advancements in large language models and diffusion models have enabled generative image semantic communication in text-based and multimodal settings, existing approaches struggle with visual fidelity due to the inherent limitations of textual descriptions and the lack of dedicated design in multimodal methods. To address these issues, we propose a compressed sensing-driven multimodal semantic communication framework that transmits saliency-adaptive sparse sampling, edge contours, and textual descriptions of images at the transmitter and reconstructs images at the receiver using guided diffusion models. We innovatively design a low-rank guided diffusion (LRGD) model to adapt to this framework, employing a dynamic smoothing low-rank guidance process in the latent space using low-quality reconstructed images. This approach enables highly accurate restoration of visual details under a low sampling ratio without additional training. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our framework uses model-independent and interpretable universal semantic representations for communication, significantly enhancing cross-model compatibility without model sharing between the transmitter and receiver. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves robust and superior image reconstruction performance across various noisy environments while compressing data to 5.7% of the original image size. Our code is available at https://github.com/mokiaca/LRGD.

The research on multi-robot systems has been divided into various fields, such as communication, navigation, task allocation, and collaborative transport. While significant progress has been made in each area, there has been limited research integrating these fields to build a fully autonomous multi-robot collaborative transport system. Therefore, we identify the key issues and propose a multi-robot collaborative transport system founded on ROS1 and conduct validation in a simulated environment, laying a solid foundation for the system to run on real robots. The primary contributions of this study include three key areas: (1) modeling and validating robot collaborative transport, (2) developing a visual task allocation system leveraging FastDDS service, and (3) resolving path collision issues in multi-robot navigation through both traditional methods and reinforcement learning techniques. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed intelligent multi-robot collaborative transport system can autonomously navigate to target points for collaborative transport task. Performance assessments, based on the error between the target point and the object’s arrival point as well as the transport trajectory error, reveal that the system effectively completes the assigned tasks.