As a powerful tool, the vehicular network has been built to connect human communication and transportation around the world for many years to come. However, with the rapid growth of vehicles, the vehicular network becomes heterogeneous, dynamic, and large scaled, which makes it difficult to meet the strict requirements, such as ultralow latency, high reliability, high security, and massive connections of the next-generation (6G) network. Recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technique to make both the vehicle and wireless communication highly efficient and adaptable. Naturally, employing ML into vehicular communication and network becomes a hot topic and is being widely studied in both academia and industry, paving the way for the future intelligentization in 6G vehicular networks. In this article, we provide a survey on various ML techniques applied to communication, networking, and security parts in vehicular networks and envision the ways of enabling AI toward a future 6G vehicular network, including the evolution of intelligent radio (IR), network intelligentization, and self-learning with proactive exploration.

Future Intelligent and Secure Vehicular Network Toward 6G: Machine-Learning Approaches

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a crucial research field spawned by the Internet of Things (IoT). IIoT links all types of industrial equipment through the network; establishes data acquisition, exchange, and analysis systems; and optimizes processes and services, so as to reduce cost and enhance productivity. The introduction of edge computing in IIoT can significantly reduce the decision-making latency, save bandwidth resources, and to some extent, protect privacy. This paper outlines the research progress concerning edge computing in IIoT. First, the concepts of IIoT and edge computing are discussed, and subsequently, the research progress of edge computing is discussed and summarized in detail. Next, the future architecture from the perspective of edge computing in IIoT is proposed, and its technical progress in routing, task scheduling, data storage and analytics, security, and standardization is analyzed. Furthermore, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of edge computing in IIoT in terms of 5G-based edge communication, load balancing and data offloading, edge intelligence, as well as data sharing security. Finally, we introduce some typical application scenarios of edge computing in IIoT, such as prognostics and health management (PHM), smart grids, manufacturing coordination, intelligent connected vehicles (ICV), and smart logistics.

Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things: Architecture, Advances and Challenges

Driven by the emergence of new compute-intensive applications and the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is foreseen that the emerging 5G network will face an unprecedented increase in traffic volume and computation demands. However, end users mostly have limited storage capacities and finite processing capabilities, thus how to run compute-intensive applications on resource-constrained users has recently become a natural concern. Mobile edge computing (MEC), a key technology in the emerging fifth generation (5G) network, can optimize mobile resources by hosting compute-intensive applications, process large data before sending to the cloud, provide the cloud computing capabilities within the radio access network (RAN) in close proximity to mobile users, and offer context-aware services with the help of RAN information. Therefore, MEC enables a wide variety of applications, where the real-time response is strictly required, e.g., driverless vehicles, augmented reality, robotics, and immerse media. Indeed, the paradigm shift from 4G to 5G could become a reality with the advent of new technological concepts. The successful realization of MEC in the 5G network is still in its infancy and demands for constant efforts from both academic and industry communities. In this survey, we first provide a holistic overview of MEC technology and its potential use cases and applications. Then, we outline up-to-date researches on the integration of MEC with the new technologies that will be deployed in 5G and beyond. We also summarize testbeds and experimental evaluations, and open source activities, for edge computing. We further summarize lessons learned from state-of-the-art research works as well as discuss challenges and potential future directions for MEC research.

A Survey of Multi-Access Edge Computing in 5G and Beyond: Fundamentals, Technology Integration, and State-of-the-Art

In the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era, billions of sensors and devices collect and process data from the environment, transmit them to cloud centers, and receive feedback via the Internet for connectivity and perception. However, transmitting massive amounts of heterogeneous data, perceiving complex environments from these data, and then making smart decisions in a timely manner are difficult. Artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, is now a proven success in various areas, including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. AI introduced into the IoT heralds the era of AI of things (AIoT). This article presents a comprehensive survey on AIoT to show how AI can empower the IoT to make it faster, smarter, greener, and safer. Specifically, we briefly present the AIoT architecture in the context of cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing. Then, we present progress in AI research for IoT from four perspectives: 1) perceiving; 2) learning; 3) reasoning; and 4) behaving. Next, we summarize some promising applications of AIoT that are likely to profoundly reshape our world. Finally, we highlight the challenges facing AIoT and some potential research opportunities.

Empowering Things With Intelligence: A Survey of the Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities in Artificial Intelligence of Things

Security and privacy in 6G networks: New areas and new challenges

The development of light detection and ranging, Radar, camera, and other advanced sensor technologies inaugurated a new era in autonomous driving. However, due to the intrinsic limitations of these sensors, autonomous vehicles are prone to making erroneous decisions and causing serious disasters. At this point, networking and communication technologies can greatly make up for sensor deficiencies, and are more reliable, feasible and efficient to promote the information interaction, thereby improving autonomous vehicle’s perception and planning capabilities as well as realizing better vehicle control. This paper surveys the networking and communication technologies in autonomous driving from two aspects: intra- and inter-vehicle. The intra-vehicle network as the basis of realizing autonomous driving connects the on-board electronic parts. The inter-vehicle network is the medium for interaction between vehicles and outside information. In addition, we present the new trends of communication technologies in autonomous driving, as well as investigate the current mainstream verification methods and emphasize the challenges and open issues of networking and communications in autonomous driving.

Networking and Communications in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

The development of mobile devices with improving communication and perceptual capabilities has brought about a proliferation of numerous complex and computation-intensive mobile applications. Mobile devices with limited resources face more severe capacity constraints than ever before. As a new concept of network architecture and an extension of cloud computing, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) seems to be a promising solution to meet this emerging challenge. However, MEC also has some limitations, such as the high cost of infrastructure deployment and maintenance, as well as the severe pressure that the complex and mutative edge computing environment brings to MEC servers. At this point, how to allocate computing resources and network resources rationally to satisfy the requirements of mobile devices under the changeable MEC conditions has become a great aporia. To combat this issue, we propose a smart, Deep Reinforcement Learning based Resource Allocation (DRLRA) scheme, which can allocate computing and network resources adaptively, reduce the average service time and balance the use of resources under varying MEC environment. Experimental results show that the proposed DRLRA performs better than the traditional OSPF algorithm in the mutative MEC conditions.

Smart Resource Allocation for Mobile Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

The rapid-developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, fast-growing network traffic, and emerging intelligent applications (e.g., autonomous driving, virtual reality, etc.) urgently require a new, faster, more reliable and flexible network form. At this time, researchers in both industry and academia have turned their attention to the sixth generation (6G) communication networks. In the 6G vision, various intelligent application scenarios that utilize Machine Learning (ML) technology (the most important branch of AI) will bring rich heterogeneous connections, as well as massive information storage and operations. When ML meets 6G, new opportunities will emerge along with numerous privacy challenges. On one hand, a secure ML structure, or the correct application of ML, can protect privacy in 6G. On the other hand, ML may be attacked or abused, resulting in privacy violation. It is worth noting that the alliance between 6G and ML may also be a double-edged sword in many cases, rather than absolutely infringe or protect privacy. Therefore, based on lots of existing meaningful works, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of ML and privacy in 6G, with a view to further promoting the development of 6G and privacy protection technologies.

When Machine Learning Meets Privacy in 6G: A Survey

With IoT-based smart cities, massive heterogeneous IoT devices are running diverse advanced services for unprecedented intelligence and efficiency in various domains of city life. Given the exponentially growing number of IoT devices and the large number of smart city services as well as their different QoS requirements, it has been a big challenge for servers to optimally allocate limited resources to all hosted applications for satisfactory performance. Note that by pushing the computing and storage resources to the proximity of end IoT devices, and deploying applications in distributed edge servers, edge computing technology appears to be a promising solution for this challenge. Toward this, we study in this article how to allocate edge resources for average service response time minimization. Besides the proposed algorithms, extensive numerical results are also presented to validate their efficacy.

Optimal Edge Resource Allocation in IoT-Based Smart Cities

The concept of smart city has been flourishing based on the prosperous development of various advanced technologies: mobile edge computing (MEC), ultra-dense networking, and software defined networking. However, it becomes increasingly complicated to design routing strategies to meet the stringent and ever changing network requirements due to the dynamic distribution of the crowd in different sectors of smart cities. To alleviate the network congestion and balance the network load for supporting smart city services with dramatic disparities, we design a deep-reinforcement- learning-based smart routing algorithm to make the distributed computing and communication infrastructure thoroughly viable while simultaneously satisfying the latency constraints of service requests from the crowd. Besides the proposed algorithm, extensive numerical results are also presented to validate its efficacy.

Jiadai Wang

Papers

Networking and Communications in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

Smart Resource Allocation for Mobile Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

When Machine Learning Meets Privacy in 6G: A Survey

Optimal Edge Resource Allocation in IoT-Based Smart Cities

Routing for Crowd Management in Smart Cities: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Perspective