Edge computing has great potential to address the challenges in mobile vehicular networks by transferring partial storage and computing functions to network edges. However, it is still a challenge to ...efficiently utilize heterogeneous edge computing architectures and deploy large-scale IoV systems. In this article, we focus on the collaborations among different edge computing anchors and propose a novel collaborative vehicular edge computing framework, called CVEC. Specifically, CVEC can support more scalable vehicular services and applications by both horizontal and vertical collaborations. Furthermore, we discuss the architecture, principle, mechanisms, special cases, and potential technical enablers to support the CVEC. Finally, we present some research challenges as well as future research directions.
Content Caching at the edge of vehicular networks has been considered as a promising technology to satisfy the increasing demands of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive vehicular applications ...for intelligent transportation. The existing content caching schemes, when used in vehicular networks, face two distinct challenges: 1) Vehicles connected to an edge server keep moving, making the content popularity varying and hard to predict. 2) Cached content is easily out-of-date since each connected vehicle stays in the area of an edge server for a short duration. To address these challenges, we propose a Mobility-aware Proactive edge Caching scheme based on Federated learning (MPCF). This new scheme enables multiple vehicles to collaboratively learn a global model for predicting content popularity with the private training data distributed on local vehicles. MPCF also employs a Context-aware Adversarial AutoEncoder to predict the highly dynamic content popularity. Besides, MPCF integrates a mobility-aware cache replacement policy, which allows the network edges to add/evict contents in response to the mobility patterns and preferences of vehicles. MPCF can greatly improve cache performance, effectively protect users' privacy and significantly reduce communication costs. Experimental results demonstrate that MPCF outperforms other baseline caching schemes in terms of the cache hit ratio in vehicular edge networks.
Remote data integrity checking (RDIC) enables a data storage server, say a cloud server, to prove to a verifier that it is actually storing a data owner's data honestly. To date, a number of RDIC ...protocols have been proposed in the literature, but most of the constructions suffer from the issue of a complex key management, that is, they rely on the expensive public key infrastructure (PKI), which might hinder the deployment of RDIC in practice. In this paper, we propose a new construction of identity-based (ID-based) RDIC protocol by making use of key-homomorphic cryptographic primitive to reduce the system complexity and the cost for establishing and managing the public key authentication framework in PKI-based RDIC schemes. We formalize ID-based RDIC and its security model, including security against a malicious cloud server and zero knowledge privacy against a third party verifier. The proposed ID-based RDIC protocol leaks no information of the stored data to the verifier during the RDIC process. The new construction is proven secure against the malicious server in the generic group model and achieves zero knowledge privacy against a verifier. Extensive security analysis and implementation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is provably secure and practical in the real-world applications.
•Formulate a problem on three-way concept lattice incremental construction.•Develop AE/OE concept lattices incremental construction algorithms.•Use 3WCA to explore the knowledge discovery of social ...networks.
Three-way concept analysis (3WCA), a combination of three-way decision and formal concept analysis, is widely used in the field of knowledge discovery. Generally, constructing three-way concept lattices requires the original formal context and its complement context simultaneously. Additionally, the existing three-way concept lattice construction algorithms focus on the static formal context, and cannot cope with the dynamic formal context that is an essential representation in social networks. Toward this end, this paper pioneers a novel problem and method for the incremental construction of three-way concept lattice for knowledge discovery in social networks. Aiming to facilitate the construction efficiency, this paper firstly investigates the three-way concept lattice construction for attribute-incremental/object-incremental formal contexts, respectively. Then, the dynamic formal context of a social network can be viewed as a special formal context with both attribute-increment and object-increment. Further, we develop the AE/OE concept lattice incremental construction algorithms, called SNS-AE and SNS-OE. Extensive experiments are conducted on various formal contexts to evaluate the effectiveness of our incremental algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed incremental algorithms can significantly decrease the construction time of three-way concept lattice compared to the non-incremental algorithm.
The ultimate goal of multiobjective optimization is to help a decision maker (DM) identify solution(s) of interest (SOI) achieving satisfactory tradeoffs among multiple conflicting criteria. This can ...be realized by leveraging DM's preference information in evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO). No consensus has been reached on the effectiveness brought by incorporating preference in EMO (either a priori or interactively) versus a posteriori decision making after a complete run of an EMO algorithm. Bearing this consideration in mind, this article: 1) provides a pragmatic overview of the existing developments of preference-based EMO (PBEMO) and 2) conducts a series of experiments to investigate the effectiveness brought by preference incorporation in EMO for approximating various SOI. In particular, the DM's preference information is elicited as a reference point, which represents her/his aspirations for different objectives. The experimental results demonstrate that preference incorporation in EMO does not always lead to a desirable approximation of SOI if the DM's preference information is not well utilized, nor does the DM elicit invalid preference information, which is not uncommon when encountering a black-box system. To a certain extent, this issue can be remedied through an interactive preference elicitation. Last but not the least, we find that a PBEMO algorithm is able to be generalized to approximate the whole PF given an appropriate setup of preference information.
Recent advances in traffic engineering offer a series of techniques to address the network problems due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. In traffic engineering, dynamic path planning is ...essential for prevalent applications, e.g., load balancing, traffic monitoring and firewall. Application-specific methods can indeed improve the network performance but can hardly be extended to general scenarios. Meanwhile, massive data generated in the current Internet has not been fully exploited, which may convey much valuable knowledge and information to facilitate traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a learning-based network path planning method under forwarding constraints for finer-grained and effective traffic engineering. We form the path planning problem as the problem of inferring a sequence of nodes in a network path and adapt a sequence-to-sequence model to learn implicit forwarding paths based on empirical network traffic data. To boost the model performance, attention mechanism and beam search are adapted to capture the essential sequential features of the nodes in a path and guarantee the path connectivity. To validate the effectiveness of the derived model, we implement it in Mininet emulator environment and leverage the traffic data generated by both a real-world GEANT network topology and a grid network topology to train and evaluate the model. Experiment results exhibit a high testing accuracy and imply the superiority of our proposal.
•A sequential model learns implicit paths from historical traffic experiences.•Attention mechanism captures correlations between source paths and target paths.•Beam search guarantees path connectivity by holding candidate paths.•A high testing accuracy implies the superiority of our proposal.
Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is a new computing paradigm that has great potential to enhance the capability of vehicle terminals (VTs) to support resource-hungry in-vehicle applications with low ...latency and high energy efficiency. In this article, we investigate an important computation offloading scheduling problem in a typical VEC scenario, where a VT traveling along an expressway intends to schedule its tasks waiting in the queue to minimize the long-term cost in terms of a tradeoff between task latency and energy consumption. Due to diverse task characteristics, dynamic wireless environment, and frequent handover events caused by vehicle movements, an optimal solution should take into account both where to schedule (i.e., local computation or offloading) and when to schedule (i.e., the order and time for execution) each task. To solve such a complicated stochastic optimization problem, we model it by a carefully designed Markov decision process (MDP) and resort to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to deal with the enormous state space. Our DRL implementation is designed based on the state-of-the-art proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm. A parameter-shared network architecture combined with a convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized to approximate both policy and value function, which can effectively extract representative features. A series of adjustments to the state and reward representations are taken to further improve the training efficiency. Extensive simulation experiments and comprehensive comparisons with six known baseline algorithms and their heuristic combinations clearly demonstrate the advantages of the proposed DRL-based offloading scheduling method.
Coverage of interest points and network connectivity are two main challenging and practically important issues of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although many studies have exploited the mobility of ...sensors to improve the quality of coverage and connectivity, little attention has been paid to the minimization of sensors' movement, which often consumes the majority of the limited energy of sensors and thus shortens the network lifetime significantly. To fill in this gap, this paper addresses the challenges of the Mobile Sensor Deployment (MSD) problem and investigates how to deploy mobile sensors with minimum movement to form a WSN that provides both target coverage and network connectivity. To this end, the MSD problem is decomposed into two sub-problems: the Target COVerage (TCOV) problem and the Network CONnectivity (NCON) problem. We then solve TCOV and NCON one by one and combine their solutions to address the MSD problem. The NP-hardness of TCOV is proved. For a special case of TCOV where targets disperse from each other farther than double of the coverage radius, an exact algorithm based on the Hungarian method is proposed to find the optimal solution. For general cases of TCOV, two heuristic algorithms, i.e., the Basic algorithm based on clique partition and the TV-Greedy algorithm based on Voronoi partition of the deployment region, are proposed to reduce the total movement distance of sensors. For NCON, an efficient solution based on the Steiner minimum tree with constrained edge length is proposed. The combination of the solutions to TCOV and NCON, as demonstrated by extensive simulation experiments, offers a promising solution to the original MSD problem that balances the load of different sensors and prolongs the network lifetime consequently.
To provide efficient networking services at the edge of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV), Software-Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) has been a promising technology to enable intelligent data exchange ...without giving additional duties to the resource constrained vehicles. Compared with conventional centralized SDVNs, hybrid SDVNs combine the centralized control of SDVNs and self-organized distributed routing of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) to mitigate the burden on the central controller caused by the frequent uplink and downlink transmissions. Although a wide variety of routing protocols have been developed, existing protocols are designed for specific scenarios without considering flexibility and adaptivity in dynamic vehicular networks. To address this problem, we propose an efficient online sequential learning-based adaptive routing scheme, namely, Penicillium reproduction-based Online Learning Adaptive Routing scheme (POLAR) for hybrid SDVNs. By utilizing the computational power of edge servers, this scheme can dynamically select a routing strategy for a specific traffic scenario by learning the pattern from network traffic. Firstly, this paper applies Geohash to divide the large geographical area into multiple grids, which facilitates the collection and processing of real-time traffic data for regional management in controller. Secondly, a new Penicillium Reproduction Algorithm (PRA) with outstanding optimization capabilities is designed to improve the learning effectiveness of Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (OS-ELM). Finally, POLAR is deployed in control plane to generate decision-making model (i.e., routing policy). Based on the real-time featured data, this scheme can choose the optimal routing strategy for a specific area. Extensive simulation results show that POLAR is superior to a single traditional routing protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency.
Rather than a whole Pareto-optimal front, which demands too many points (especially in a high-dimensional space), the decision maker (DM) may only be interested in a partial region, called the region ...of interest (ROI). In this case, solutions outside this region can be noisy to the decision-making procedure. Even worse, there is no guarantee that we can find the preferred solutions when tackling problems with complicated properties or many objectives. In this paper, we develop a systematic way to incorporate the DM's preference information into the decomposition-based evolutionary multiobjective optimization methods. Generally speaking, our basic idea is a nonuniform mapping scheme by which the originally evenly distributed reference points on a canonical simplex can be mapped to new positions close to the aspiration-level vector supplied by the DM. By this means, we are able to steer the search process toward the ROI either directly or interactively and also handle many objectives. Meanwhile, solutions lying on the boundary can be approximated as well given the DM's requirements. Furthermore, the extent of the ROI is intuitively understandable and controllable in a closed form. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmark problems with 2 to 10 objectives, fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for approximating the preferred solutions in the ROI.
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