The sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks are envisioned to revolutionize customer services and applications via the Internet of Things (IoT) towards a future of fully intelligent and autonomous systems. In this article, we explore the emerging opportunities brought by 6G technologies in IoT networks and applications, by conducting a holistic survey on the convergence of 6G and IoT. We first shed light on some of the most fundamental 6G technologies that are expected to empower future IoT networks, including edge intelligence, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, space-air-ground-underwater communications, Terahertz communications, massive ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, and blockchain. Particularly, compared to the other related survey papers, we provide an in-depth discussion of the roles of 6G in a wide range of prospective IoT applications via five key domains, namely Healthcare Internet of Things, Vehicular Internet of Things and Autonomous Driving, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Satellite Internet of Things, and Industrial Internet of Things. Finally, we highlight interesting research challenges and point out potential directions to spur further research in this promising area.

6G Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

As one of the most promising applications in future Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been acknowledged as a fundamental technology for developing the Intelligent Transportation Systems in smart cities. With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) communications technologies, massive network infrastructures will be densely deployed and the number of network nodes will increase exponentially, leading to extremely high energy consumption. There has been an upsurge of interest to develop the green IoV towards sustainable vehicular communication and networking in the 6G era. However, as a special mobile ad-hoc network, the energy cost in an IoV system involves the communication and computation energy in addition to the fuel consumption and the electricity cost of moving vehicles. Moreover, the energy harvesting technology, which is likely to be adopted widely in 6G systems, will complicate the optimization of energy efficiency in the entire system. Current studies focus only on part of the energy issues in IoV systems without a comprehensive discussion of the state-of-the-art energy-efficient approaches and the influence of the development of 6G networks on green IoV. In this paper, we present the main considerations for green IoV from five different scenarios, including the communication, computation, traffic, Electric Vehicles (EVs), and energy harvesting management. The literature relevant to each of the scenarios is compared from the perspective of energy optimization (e.g., with respect to resource allocation, workload scheduling, routing design, traffic control, charging management, energy harvesting and sharing) and the related factors affecting energy efficiency (e.g., resource limitation, channel state, network topology, traffic condition). In addition, we introduce the potential challenges and the emerging technologies in 6G for developing green IoV systems. Finally, we discuss the research trends in designing energy-efficient IoV systems.

Green Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in the 6G Era: Toward Sustainable Vehicular Communications and Networking

As one of the most promising applications in future Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been acknowledged as a fundamental technology for developing the Intelligent Transportation Systems in smart cities. With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) communications technologies, massive network infrastructures will be densely deployed and the number of network nodes will increase exponentially, leading to extremely high energy consumption. There has been an upsurge of interest to develop the green IoV towards sustainable vehicular communication and networking in the 6G era. However, as a special mobile ad-hoc network, the energy cost in an IoV system involves the communication and computation energy in addition to the fuel consumption and the electricity cost of moving vehicles. Moreover, the energy harvesting technology, which is likely to be adopted widely in 6G systems, will complicate the optimization of energy efficiency in the entire system. Current studies focus only on part of the energy issues in IoV systems without a comprehensive discussion of the state-of-the-art energy-efficient approaches and the influence of the development of 6G networks on green IoV. In this paper, we present the main considerations for green IoV from five different scenarios, including the communication, computation, traffic, Electric Vehicles (EVs), and energy harvesting management. The literature relevant to each of the scenarios is compared from the perspective of energy optimization (e.g., with respect to resource allocation, workload scheduling, routing design, traffic control, charging management, energy harvesting and sharing) and the related factors affecting energy efficiency (e.g., resource limitation, channel state, network topology, traffic condition). In addition, we introduce the potential challenges and the emerging technologies in 6G for developing green IoV systems. Finally, we discuss the research trends in designing energy-efficient IoV systems. 

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As one of the most promising applications in future Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been acknowledged as a fundamental technology for developing the Intelligent Transportation Systems in smart cities. With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) communications technologies, massive network infrastructures will be densely deployed and the number of network nodes will increase exponentially, leading to extremely high energy consumption. There has been an upsurge of interest to develop the green IoV towards sustainable vehicular communication and networking in the 6G era. In this paper, we present the main considerations for green IoV from five different scenarios, including the communication, computation, traffic, Electric Vehicles (EVs), and energy harvesting management. The literatures relevant to each of the scenarios are compared from the perspective of energy optimization (e.g., with respect to resource allocation, workload scheduling, routing design, traffic control, charging management, energy harvesting and sharing, etc.) and the related factors affecting energy efficiency (e.g., resource limitation, channel state, network topology, traffic condition, etc.). In addition, we introduce the potential challenges and the emerging technologies in 6G for developing green IoV systems. Finally, we discuss the research trends in designing energy-efficient IoV systems.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have undergone rapid developments in recent decades. This has made them very popular for various military and civilian applications allowing us to reach places that were previously hard to reach in addition to saving time and lives. A highly desirable direction when developing unmanned aerial vehicles is towards achieving fully autonomous missions and performing their dedicated tasks with minimum human interaction. Thus, this paper provides a survey of some of the recent developments in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles related to safe autonomous navigation, which is a very critical component in the whole system. A great part of this paper focus on advanced methods capable of producing three-dimensional avoidance maneuvers and safe trajectories. Research challenges related to unmanned aerial vehicle development are also highlighted.

Towards Fully Autonomous UAVs: A Survey.

Research on the sixth-generation cellular networks (6G) is gaining huge momentum to achieve ubiquitous wireless connectivity. Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is a critical vertical application for 6G, holding great potentials of improving road safety, road and energy efficiency. However, the stringent service requirements of CAV applications on reliability, latency, and high speed communications will present big challenges to 6G networks. New channel access algorithms and intelligent control schemes for connected vehicles are needed for 6G-supported CAV. In this article, we investigated 6G-supported cooperative driving, which is an advanced driving mode through information sharing and driving coordination. First, we quantify the delay upper bounds of 6G vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications with hybrid communication and channel access technologies. A deep learning neural network is developed and trained for the fast computation of the delay bounds in real-time operations. Then, an intelligent strategy is designed to control the intervehicle distance for cooperative autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose a Markov chain-based algorithm to predict the parameters of the system states, and also a safe distance mapping method to enable smooth vehicular speed changes. The proposed algorithms are implemented in the AirSim autonomous driving platform. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are effective and robust with safe and stable cooperative autonomous driving, which greatly improve the road safety, capacity, and efficiency.

Deep-Learning-Based Intelligent Intervehicle Distance Control for 6G-Enabled Cooperative Autonomous Driving

With the advantages of easy deployment and flexible usage, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has advanced the Multi-Target Tracking (MTT) applications. The UAV-MTT system has great potentials to execute dull, dangerous, and critical missions for frontier defense and security. A key challenge in UAV-MTT is how to coordinate multiple UAVs to track diverse invading targets accurately and consecutively. In this paper, we propose a UAV swarm-based cooperative tracking architecture to systematically improve the UAV tracking performance. We design an intelligent UAV swarm-based cooperative algorithm for consecutive target tracking and physical collision avoidance. Moreover, we design an efficient cooperative algorithm to predict the trajectory of invading targets accurately. Our simulation results demonstrate that the swarm behaviors stay stable in realistic scenarios with perturbing obstacles. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions such as the matched deep Q-network, our algorithms can increase tracking accuracy by 60%, reduce tracking delay by 23%, and achieve physical collision-avoidance during the tracking process.

Intelligent UAV Swarm Cooperation for Multiple Targets Tracking

Various interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) devices have emerged, led by the intelligence of the IoT, to realize exceptional interaction with the physical world. In this context, UAV swarm-enabled Multiple Targets Tracking (UAV-MTT), which can sense and track mobile targets for many applications such as hit-and-run, is an appealing topic. Unfortunately, UAVs cannot implement real-time MTT based on the traditional centralized pattern due to the complicated road network environment. It is also challenging to realize low-overhead UAV swarm cooperation in a distributed architecture for the real-time MTT. To address the problem, we propose a cyber-twin-based distributed tracking algorithm to update and optimize a trained digital model for real-time MTT. We then design a distributed cooperative tracking framework to promote MTT performance. In the design, both short-distance and long-distance distributed tracking cooperation manners are firstly realized with low energy consumption in communication by integrating resources of sensing and communication. Resource integration promotes target sensing efficiency with a highly successful tracking ratio as well. Theoretical derivation proves our algorithmic convergence. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can remarkably save 65.7&#x0025; energy consumption in communication compared to other benchmarks while efficiently promoting 20.0&#x0025; sensing performance. 

Integrated Sensing and Communication in UAV Swarms for Cooperative Multiple Targets Tracking

The dike-pond system (DPS) is the integration of a natural or man-made pond and crop cultivation on dikes, widely distributed in the Pearl River Delta and Jianghan plain in China. It plays a key role in preserving biodiversity, enhancing the nutrient cycle, and increasing crop production. However, DPS is rarely mapped at a large scale with satellite data, due to the limitations in the training dataset and traditional classification methods. This study improved the deep learning algorithm Cascade Region Convolutional Neural Network (Cascade R-CNN) algorithm to detect the DPS in Qianjiang City using high-resolution satellite data. In the proposed mCascade R-CNN, the regular convolution layer in the backbone was modified into the deformable convolutional layer, which was more suitable for learning the features of DPS with variable shapes and orientations. The mCascade R-CNN yielded the most accurate detection of DPS, with an average precision (AP) value that was 2.71% higher than Cascade R-CNN and 11.84% higher than You Look Only Once-v4 (YOLOv4). The area of oilseed rape growing on the dikes accounted for 3.42% of the total oilseed rape planting area. This study demonstrates the potential of the deep leaning methods combined with high-resolution satellite images in detecting integrated agriculture systems.

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/3/717/pdf?version=1643881499

Identifying Dike-Pond System Using an Improved Cascade R-CNN Model and High-Resolution Satellite Images

With sixth generation (6G) communication technologies, target sensing can be finished in milliseconds. The mobile tracking-oriented Internet of Things (MTT-IoT) as a kind of emerging application network can detect sensor nodes and track targets within their sensing ranges cooperatively. Nevertheless, huge data processing and low latency demands put tremendous pressure on the conventional architecture where sensing data is executed in the remote cloud and the short transmission distance of 6G channels presents new challenges into the design of network topology. To cope with the above difficulties, this paper proposes a new resource allocation scheme to perform delicate node scheduling and accurate tracking in multitarget tracking mobile networks. The dynamic tracking problem is formulated as an infinite horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the state space that considers energy consumption, system responding delay, and target important degree is extended. A model-free reinforcement learning is applied to obtain satisfied tracking actions by frequent iterations, in which smart agents interact with the complicated environment directly. The performance of each episode is evaluated by the action-value function in search of the optimal reward. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme shows excellent tracking performance in terms of energy cost and tracking delay.

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Longyu Zhou

Papers

Deep-Learning-Based Intelligent Intervehicle Distance Control for 6G-Enabled Cooperative Autonomous Driving

Intelligent UAV Swarm Cooperation for Multiple Targets Tracking

Integrated Sensing and Communication in UAV Swarms for Cooperative Multiple Targets Tracking

Identifying Dike-Pond System Using an Improved Cascade R-CNN Model and High-Resolution Satellite Images

Intelligent Sensing and Computing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Multiple Target Tracking