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In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient multi-access mobile edge computing with secrecy provisioning. Specifically, we first investigate the scenario of one wireless device's (WD's) multi-access offloading subject to a malicious node's eavesdropping. By characterizing the WD's secrecy based throughput in its offloading transmission, we formulate a joint optimization of the WD's multi-access computation offloading, secrecy provisioning, and offloading-transmission duration, with the objective of minimizing the WD's total energy consumption, while providing a guaranteed secrecy-outage during offloading and a guaranteed overall-latency in completing the WD's workload. Despite the non-convexity of this joint optimization problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. Based on the study on the single-WD scenario, we further investigate the scenario of multiple WDs, in which a group of WDs sequentially execute the multi-access computation offloading, while subject to a malicious node's eavesdropping. Taking the coupling effect among different WDs into account, we propose a swapping-heuristic based algorithm (that uses our proposed single-WD algorithm as a subroutine) for finding the ordering of the WDs to execute the multi-access computation offloading, with the objective of minimizing all WDs' total energy consumption. Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms.

Internet of Things (IoT) is able to provide various physical objects to exchange their information through the 6G wireless communication network. However, with the large increasing number of the IoT devices (IoDs), the deployment of IoDs faces two basic challenges, i.e., spectrum scarcity and energy limitation. Cooperative spectrum sharing and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) provide effective ways to improve the spectrum and energy efficiency. In this article, two SWIPT cooperative spectrum sharing methods are proposed to improve the energy and spectrum efficiency for 6G-enabled cognitive IoT network, in which IoDs access to the primary spectrum by serving as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) relay with the energy harvested from the received radio-frequency (RF) signal. Specifically, in phase1, the IoDs transmitter (DT) in the cognitive IoT network performs information decoding and energy harvesting with the received RF signal. In phase2, DT transmits the signals of the primary system and itself to the corresponding receiver by utilizing orthogonal subcarriers with the harvested energy to avoid the interference. Achievable rates of the cognitive IoT system with amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying mode are maximized through joint power and subcarrier optimization, while ensuring the target rate of the primary system. Simulation results are performed to illustrate the improvement of the spectrum and energy efficiency.

Multiaccess mobile edge computing (MA-MEC) has been envisioned as one of the key approaches for enabling computation-intensive yet delay-sensitive services in future industrial Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we exploit nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for computation offloading in MA-MEC and propose a joint optimization of the multiaccess multitask computation offloading, NOMA transmission, and computation-resource allocation, with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of IoT device to complete its tasks subject to the required latency limit. We first focus on a static channel scenario and propose a distributed algorithm to solve the joint optimization problem by identifying the layered structure of the formulated nonconvex problem. Furthermore, we consider a dynamic channel scenario in which the channel power gains from the IoT device to the edge-computing servers are time varying. To tackle with the difficulty due to the huge number of different channel realizations in the dynamic scenario, we propose an online algorithm, which is based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to efficiently learn the near-optimal offloading solutions for the time-varying channel realizations. Numerical results are provided to validate our distributed algorithm for the static channel scenario and the DRL-based online algorithm for the dynamic channel scenario. We also demonstrate the advantage of the NOMA assisted multitask MA-MEC against conventional orthogonal multiple access scheme under both static and dynamic channels.

Integrating the energy-harvesting (EH) relay and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technologies into narrow band internet of things (NB-IoT) networks can efficiently improve the energy and spectrum efficiency of the network and the quality-of-service of edge users. Therefore, we consider an EH relay aided NOMA NB-IoT network in this letter. To reduce the rate variance among NB-IoT devices, we aim to maximize the proportional fairness of data rate across all NB-IoT devices through jointly optimizing the communication resource allocation and successive interference cancellation (SIC) ordering subject to the minimum data rate requirements. Considering the non-convexity of this optimization problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based online optimization algorithm to obtain the sub-optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can efficiently improve the proportional fairness and the total throughput among NB-IoT devices, in comparison with orthogonal multiple access techniques.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising approach for enabling the computation-intensive yet latency-sensitive mobile Internet services in future wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the secrecy based energy-efficient MEC via cooperative Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) transmission. We consider that an edge-computing device (ED) offloads its computation-workload to the edge-computing server (ECS) subject to the overhearing-attack of a malicious eavesdropper. To enhance the secrecy of the ED’s offloading transmission, a group of conventional wireless devices (WDs) are scheduled to form a NOMA-transmission group with the ED for sending data to the cellular base station (BS) while providing cooperative jamming to the eavesdropper. We formulate a joint optimization of the ED’s offloaded workload, transmit-power, NOMA-transmission duration as well as the selection of the WDs, with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of the ED and the selected WDs, while subject to the ED’s latency-requirement and the selected WDs’ required data-volumes to deliver. Despite the nature of mixed binary and non-convex programming of the formulated problem, we exploit the vertical decomposition and propose a three-layered algorithm for solving it efficiently. To further address the fairness among different WDs, we investigate a system-wise utility maximization problem that accounts for the fairness in the WDs’ delivered data and the total energy consumption of the ED and WDs. By exploiting our previously designed layered-algorithm, we further propose a stochastic learning based algorithm for determining each WD’s optimal data-volume delivered. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms as well as the performance advantage of the secrecy based computation offloading via NOMA.

Deep learning-based algorithms provide a promising solution to efficiently generate offloading decisions in mobile edge computing (MEC) networks. However, considering dynamic MEC devices or offloading tasks, most of them require large-scale training data and long training time to retrain the deep neural networks (DNNs). In this letter, we propose a MEta-Learning-based computation Offloading (MELO) algorithm for dynamic computation tasks in MEC networks. Specifically, it learns from historical MEC task scenarios and adapts to a new MEC task scenario with a few training samples. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can adapt to a new MEC task scenario and achieve 99% accuracy via 1-step fine-tuning using only 10 training samples.

The deep penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) into the transportation section and the associated charging management has yielded a critical issue, namely, how to efficiently store the generated charging records. In this article, we investigate the cost-efficient charging-record storage scheme by exploiting blockchain (BC). Accounting for the operational cost due to the consensus process via the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) protocol, we model the associated cost for storing the charging records via an ideal multiblockchain system and formulate a joint optimization of the storage selection (i.e., either storing the charging record locally or selecting one of the BCs for storing the charging record) and server-node allocation for each BC, with the objective of minimizing a systemwise cost. Despite the nature of the complicated mixed binary and integer programming problem, we exploit the decomposition structure and propose a layered algorithm (i.e., the bottom subproblem for determining the optimal storage selection and the top problem for finding the server-node allocation) to solve it. For the bottom subproblem, we exploit the nature of minimum weighted matching of the problem and propose a distributed auction-based algorithm for computing the optimal storage selection. With the optimal solution from the subproblem, we further propose an annealing-based algorithm to determine the server-node allocation for each BC. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance of our cost-efficient charging-record storage scheme via BC.

Powering cellular networks with hybrid energy supplies is not only environment-friendly but can also reduce the on-grid energy consumption, thus being emerging as a promising solution for green networking. Intelligent management of spectrum and power can increase the network utility in cellular networks with hybrid energy supplies, usually at the cost of higher energy consumption. Unlike prior studies on either the network utility maximization or on-grid energy cost minimization, this paper studies the joint spectrum and power allocation problem that maximizes the system revenue in a heterogeneous small-cell network with hybrid energy supplies. Specifically, the system revenue is considered as the difference between the network utility and on-grid energy cost. By developing the convexity of the optimization problem through transformation and reparameterization, we propose a joint spectrum and power allocation algorithm based on the primal-dual arguments to obtain the optimal solution by iteratively solving the primal and dual sub-problems of the convex optimization problem. To solve the primal sub-problem, we further propose the Lagrangian maximization based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and derive the optimal solution in the closed-form expression at each iteration. It is shown that the proposed joint spectrum and power allocation algorithm approaches the global optimality at the rate of $1/n$ 1 / n with $n$ n being the number of iterations. Also, the proposed ADMM-based Lagrangian maximization algorithm approaches the primal optimal solution with the time complexity of $O(1/\epsilon _r)$ O ( 1 / e r ) iterations with $\epsilon _r$ e r being the termination parameter. Simulation results show that in comparison with the power control with equal frequency allocation algorithm and frequency allocation with equal power allocation algorithms the proposed algorithm increases the system revenue by over 20 and 60 percent without consuming more on-grid energy when the proportional fairness utility and the weighted sum rate utility are considered with the approximate system parameter settings, respectively. Meanwhile, in comparison with the full frequency reuse case, the proposed algorithm increases the system revenue by 20 percent at least in terms of the weighted sum rate utility, although it achieves the similar system revenue when considering the proportional fairness utility. Simulation results also show that our proposed algorithm can perform well under the realistic fast fading channel conditions.

Edge computing has been considered as one of the key paradigms in the fifth-generation (5G) networks for enabling computation-intensive yet latency-sensitive vehicular Internet services. In this paper, we investigate non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted vehicular edge computing via underlay spectrum sharing, in which vehicular computing-users (VUs) form a NOMA-group and reuse conventional cellular user's (CU's) channel for computation offloading. In spite of the benefit of spectrum sharing, the resulting co-channel interference degrades the CU's transmission. We thus firstly focus on a single-cell scenario of two VUs reusing one CU's channel, and analyze the CU's increased delay due to sharing channel with the VUs. We then jointly optimize the VUs’ partial offloading and the allocation of the communication and computing resources to minimize the VUs’ delay while limiting the CU's suffered increased delay. An efficient layered-algorithm is proposed to tackle with the non-convexity of the joint optimization problem. Based on our study on the single-cell scenario, we further investigate the multi-cell scenario in which a group of VUs flexibly form pairs to reuse the channels of different CUs for offloading, and formulate an optimal pairing problem to minimize the VUs’ overall-delay. To address the difficulty due to the combinatorial nature of the pairing problem, we propose a cross-entropy (CE) based probabilistic learning algorithm to find the optimal VU-pairings. Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms for both the single-cell scenario and multi-cell scenario. The results also demonstrate that our NOMA-assisted MEC via spectrum sharing can outperform the conventional frequency division multiple access assisted offloading scheme.

This study presents a mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled UAV communication system, where a number of UAVs are served by terrestrial base stations (TBSs) equipped with computation resource in the non-orthogonal multiple access manner. Each UAV has to offload its computing tasks to the proper TBS due to the limited energy supply. For this, the authors aim at minimising the sum of transmission energy of UAVs and computation energy of TBSs through jointly optimising the UAV transmit power, computation resource allocation, and UAV grouping. Considering the non-convexity of this optimisation problem, they obtain the optimal solution in the coupled steps: the convex resource allocation optimisation and the combinatorial UAV grouping optimisation. By exploiting the convex nature of the resource allocation optimisation problem, they obtain the optimal transmit power and computation allocation based on the KKT conditions and the idea of gradient descent method when considering a single TBS. Then, they adopt the simulated annealing to obtain the optimal UAV grouping and TBS selection based on the proposed resource allocation optimisation algorithm. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed joint optimisation of transmit power, computation resource allocation, and UAV grouping can effectively reduce the energy consumption of MEC-aware UAV communication system.

The accurate prediction of vehicle state based on the data acquired by the vehicular networking system plays an important role in improving traffic safety in the transportation section. However, it is difficult to accurately predict the vehicle state due to the highly dynamic road environment and various drivers’ behaviors. To this end, in this article, we propose a two-level quantized adaptive Kalman filter (KF) algorithm based on the autoregressive moving average (MA) model to predict the vehicle state (including the moving direction, driving lane, vehicle speed, and acceleration). First, we propose a vehicular networking system to acquire the vehicle data by exchanging traffic data between the onboard unit and the roadside unit (RSU). Then, we predict the vehicle state at the edge cloud server (ECS) equipped at the RSU. Specifically, we utilize the autoregressive MA model to predict vehicle acceleration at the next moment. Then, the predicted vehicle acceleration is used as an input variable of the adaptive KF model to predict the vehicle location and speed at the next moment, in which we quantify the predicted vehicle location to the moving direction and the driving lane. Finally, the ECS broadcasts the predicted state to other RSUs. Through the communication with the road unit, all vehicles moving at the intersection can share vehicles states each other. In this doing, we can efficiently improve traffic safety in the intersection. We provide numerical simulations to validate the effectiveness of the autoregressive MA model used for predicting acceleration. Then, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed two-level quantized adaptive KF algorithm. Compared with five conventional prediction algorithms, our proposed algorithm can improve the speed prediction accuracy by 90.62%, 89.81%, 88.91%, 82.76%, and 70.77%, respectively, which implies that our algorithm is a promising scheme for predicting the vehicle state in vehicular networks.

Driven by the explosive growth in computation-intensive applications in future 5G networks and industries, mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables smart terminals (STs) to offload their computation workloads to nearby edge servers (ESs) in radio access networks, has attracted increasing attention. In this article, we investigate the energy-efficient multitask multiaccess MEC via nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Exploiting NOMA, an ST with multiple tasks can offload the respective computation workloads of different tasks to different ESs simultaneously. To study this problem, we adopt a two-step approach. Specifically, we first consider a given task-ES assignment and formulate a joint optimization of the tasks’ computation offloading, local computation-resource allocation, and the NOMA-transmission duration, with the objective of minimizing the ST's total energy consumption for completing all tasks. Next, based on the optimal offloading solution for the given task-ES assignment, we further investigate how to properly assign different tasks to the ESs for further minimizing the ST's total energy consumption. For both the formulated problems, we propose efficient algorithms to compute the respective solutions. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. The results also show that our proposed NOMA-enabled multitask multiaccess computation offloading can outperform conventional orthogonal multiple access based offloading scheme, especially when the tasks have heavy computation-workload requirements and stringent delay limits.

In this article, we investigate the cellular assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) via non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where a group of edge-computing users (EUs) exploit NOMA to simultaneously offload their computation-workloads to an edge-server (ES), and conventional cellular-user (CU) allows the EUs to reuse its authorized frequency channel for the NOMA-transmission. We firstly characterize the transmit-powers of the CU and EUs and then formulate a joint optimization of the EUs’ offloaded computation-workloads, offloading-duration (i.e., how long for reusing the CU's channel), as well as the ES's computation-resource allocations (for processing different EUs’ offloaded workloads), with the objective of minimizing the overall-latency in completing all EUs’ computation-requirements, subject to the CU‘s and EUs’ limited power and energy capacities as well as the ES's limited computation-resource capacity. Despite the strict non-convexity of the formulated joint optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal offloading solution. With the optimal offloading solution for the scenario of one CU, we further investigate the scenario of multiple CUs and investigate the optimal pairing of the EUs for reusing different CUs’ channels for computation-offloading. Taking into account the coupling effect due to the ES's limited computation-resource, we formulate a joint optimization of the EU-pairing and the ES's capacity allocation of the computation-resource for accommodating different EU-pairs. Despite the difficulty due to the mixed binary and non-linear non-convex programming of the formulated problem, we propose an efficient layered algorithm for solving the problem. Numerical results are provided to validate the accuracy of our proposed algorithms. We also show the performance advantage of our NOMA-assisted offloading in comparison with conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) based computation offloading.

A novel grant-free random access scheme is proposed to support massive connectivity with low access delay and overhead for machine-to-machine communication in massive multiple-input–multiple-output systems. This scheme allows all active user equipments (UEs) to transmit their pilots and uplink messages via the same time–frequency resource and performs the joint active UEs detection and uplink message decoding without channel estimation in one shot by utilizing the proposed ensemble independent component analysis (EICA) decoding algorithm. We call the proposed scheme the EICA-based pilot random access (EICA-PA). We analyze the successful access probability, probability of missed detection, and uplink throughput of the EICA-PA scheme. Numerical results show that the EICA-PA scheme significantly improves the successful access probability and uplink throughput, decreases missed detection probability and provides low-frame error rate at the same time.

The past decades have witnessed an explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) services requiring intensive computation resources. The conventional IoT devices, however, are usually equipped with very limited computation resources, which results in degraded quality of experience when executing the resource-hungry applications. Mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables smart terminals (STs) to offload parts of their computation workloads to the edge servers located at cellular base stations (BSs), has provided a promising approach to address this issue. In this article, we investigate the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled multiaccess MEC. Specifically, by exploiting the advanced NOMA, an ST can simultaneously offload its computation workloads to different edge servers (ESs), which thus reduces the overall delay in completing the ST’s computation workloads. To study this problem, we formulate a joint optimization of the computation resource allocations at the ESs, the ST’s offloaded workloads and its radio resource allocations for NOMA transmission, with the objective of minimizing a system wise cost that accounts for the overall delay in finishing the ST’s total computation workload and the total computation resource usage cost at the ESs. Despite the nonconvexity of the joint optimization problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose an efficient layered algorithm to find the optimal solution. By exploiting the optimal offloading solution of a single ST, we further investigate the scenario of multiple STs and propose two algorithms to determine the optimal grouping among different ESs for serving the STs, with one algorithm aiming at minimizing the total cost of all STs and the other algorithm aiming at determining the Nash stable grouping for the ESs. Numerical results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and show the performance gain of our proposed NOMA-enabled multiaccess computation offloading.

Federated learning (FL) has been considered as an efficient yet privacy-preserving approach for enabling the distributed learning. There have been many studies investigating the applications of FL in different scenarios, e.g., Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, and UAV systems. However, due to delivering the trained model via wireless links, FL may suffer from a potential issue, i.e., some malicious users may intentionally overhear the trained model delivered through the wireless links. In this paper, we investigate the energy optimization for nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted with secrecy provisioning. Specifically, we consider that the wireless devices (WDs) adopt NOMA to deliver their respectively trained local models to a base station (BS) which serves a parameter-server, and there exists a malicious node that overhears the parameter-server when delivering the aggregated global model to all WDs. We adopt the physical layer security to quantify the secrecy throughput under the eavesdropping attack and formulate an optimization problem to minimize the overall energy consumption of all the WDs in FL, by jointly optimizing the uplink time, the downlink time, the local model accuracy, and the uplink decoding order of NOMA. In spite of the non-convexity of this joint optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm, which is based on the theory of monotonic optimization, for finding the solution. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve the almost same solutions as the LINGO's global-solver while reducing more than 90% computation-time than LINGO. Moreover, the results also show that our proposed NOMA decoding scheme can outperform some heuristic decoding schemes.

The significant advances of cellular systems and mobile Internet services have yielded a variety of computation intensive applications, resulting in great challenge to mobile terminals (MTs) with limited computation resources. Mobile edge computing, which enables MTs to offload their computation tasks to edge servers located at cellular base stations (BSs), has provided a promising approach to address this challenging issue. Considering the advantage of improving transmission efficiency provided by nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA), we propose an NOMA-enabled computation offloading scheme, in which a group of MTs offload partial of their computation workloads to an edge server based on the NOMA transmission. After finishing all MTs’ offloaded computation workloads, the edge server sends the computation results back to the MTs based on NOMA. We aim at minimizing the overall delay for completing all MTs’ computation requirements, which is achieved by jointly optimizing the MTs’ offloaded computation workloads, and the uploading duration for the MTs to send their computation workloads to the BS, and the downloading-duration for the BS to send the computation results back to the MTs. Despite the nonconvexity of the joint optimization problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal offloading solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed algorithm and show the performance advantage of our NOMA-enabled computation-offloading scheme.

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile edge computing (MEC) have been emerging as promising techniques in narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) systems to provide ubiquitously connected IoT devices with efficient transmission and computation. However, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) ordering of NOMA has become the bottleneck limiting the performance improvement for the uplink transmission, which is the dominant traffic flow of NB-IoT communications. Also, in order to guarantee the fairness of task execution latency across NB-IoT devices, the computation resource of MEC units has to be fairly allocated to tasks from IoT devices according to the task size. For these reasons, we investigate the joint optimization of SIC ordering and computation resource allocation in this paper. Specifically, we formulate a combinatorial optimization problem with the objective to minimize the maximum task execution latency required per task bit across NB-IoT devices under the limitation of computation resource. We prove the NP-hardness of this joint optimization problem. To tackle this challenging problem, we first propose an optimal algorithm to obtain the optimal SIC ordering and computation resource allocation in two stages: the convex computation resource allocation optimization followed by the combinatorial SIC ordering optimization. To reduce the computational complexity, we design an efficient heuristic algorithm for the SIC ordering optimization. As a good feature, the proposed low-complexity algorithm suffers a negligible performance degradation in comparison with the optimal algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of NOMA in reducing the task execution latency.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that proffers to connect massive smart devices together and to the Internet. On the basis of IoT, a smart city is endowed with real-time monitoring, ubiquitous sensing, universal connectivity, and intelligent information processing and control. An IoT-based smart city can offer various smart services to citizens and administrators, thus improving the utilization of public resources regarding transportation, healthcare, environment, entertainment, and energy. The integration of transmitting, computing, and caching is having a profound impact on the development of flexible and efficient IoT in smart cities. However, with the introduction of ultra dense networking (UDN) and mobile edge computing (MEC), we have to carefully consider a joint problem across the physical layer and MAC layer to enable the efficient transmission, computation, and caching of big IoT data generated by massive IoT devices distributed in a city. In doing so, efficient multiple access and computation offloading should be addressed in the physical layer and MAC layer, respectively. In this article, we propose a scalable and sustainable IoT framework that integrates UDN-based hierarchical multiple access and computation offloading between MEC and cloud to support the smart city vision. The proposed integrated framework can substantially reduce the end-to-end delay and energy consumption of computing data from massive IoT devices. Numerical comparison results are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed framework. In addition, we discuss a number of open research issues in implementing the proposed framework. Introduction

The rapid growth of mobile internet services has yielded a variety of computation-intensive applications such as virtual/augmented reality. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which enables mobile terminals to offload computation tasks to servers located at the edge of the cellular networks, has been considered as an efficient approach to relieve the heavy computational burdens and realize an efficient computation offloading. Driven by the consequent requirement for proper resource allocations for computation offloading via MEC, in this paper, we propose a Deep-Q Network (DQN) based task offloading and resource allocation algorithm for the MEC. Specifically, we consider a MEC system in which every mobile terminal has multiple tasks offloaded to the edge server and design a joint task offloading decision and bandwidth allocation optimization to minimize the overall offloading cost in terms of energy cost, computation cost, and delay cost. Although the proposed optimization problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming in nature, we exploit an emerging DQN technique to solve it. Extensive numerical results show that our proposed DQN-based approach can achieve the near-optimal performance. Keywords: Mobile edge computing, Joint computation offloading and resource allocation, Deep-Q network

In this letter, we investigate the joint channel bandwidth and rate allocations for downlink non-orthogonal multiple access with the objective of maximizing the resource utilization efficiency (RUE). In particular, we take into account the utility of base station (BS) in serving the mobile terminals’ traffic and the cost in consuming channel bandwidth and measure the RUE as the ratio between the BS’s utility and the total power consumption. Despite the non-convexity of the joint optimization problem, we propose a three-layered vertical decomposition and design an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal solution. Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the performance of our proposed algorithms.

Human facial age estimation has been widely used in many computer vision applications, including security surveillance, forensics, biometrics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and so on. We propose a facial age estimation method oriented to non-ideal facial imagery. The method consists of image preprocessing, feature extraction, and age predication. First, we preprocess non-ideal input images in RGB stream, luminance modified (LM) stream, and YIQ stream. Then, we leverage the deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to extract the feature of images preprocessed in each stream. To reduce the training data volume and training complexity, we adopt the transfer learning to build the DCNN structure. With the extracted feature, the weak classifier equipped at every stream is designed to obtain a weak classification prediction of the age range. Moreover, in order to generate estimation, we use the ensemble learning to fuse the three weak classifiers. We design an integrated strategy algorithm based on the combination of voting method and weighted average method. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can improve the an exact match (AEM) and an error of one age category (AEO) by 4.75% and 6.75% compared with the best AEM and AEO of the three weak classifiers. Furthermore, in comparison with the unweighted average method, our proposed algorithm can improve the AEM and AEO by 8.68% and 12.79%, respectively.

Equipped with machine learning (ML) models, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms can execute various applications like surveillance and target detection. However, the connections between UAVs and cloud servers cannot be guaranteed, especially when executing massive data. Thus, traditional cloud-centric approach will not be suitable, since it may cause high latency and significant bandwidth consumption. In this work, we propose a federated learning (FL) framework via non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for a UAV swarm which is composed of a leader-UAV and a group of follower-UAVs. Specifically, each follower-UAV updates its local model by using its collected data, and then all follower-UAVs form a NOMA-group to send their respectively trained FL parameters (i.e., the local FL models) to the leader-UAV simultaneously. We formulate a joint optimization of the uplink NOMA-transmission durations, downlink broadcasting duration, as well as the computation-rates of the leader-UAV and all follower-UAVs, aiming at minimizing the latency in executing the FL iterations until reaching a specified accuracy. Numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can outperform some baseline strategies.

Computation offloading via mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as one of the promising paradigms for enabling computation-intensive yet latency-sensitive services on resource-limited mobile terminals in future wireless systems. In this paper, we propose a channel sharing assisted multi-user computation offloading in MEC via non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), in which a group of edge-computing users (EUs) form a NOMA-group and further reuse the cellular user’s (CU’s) channel for computation-offloading transmission. Specifically, we formulate a joint optimization of the EUs’ offloaded workloads, NOMA-transmission duration, as well as the processing-rate allocations (for different EUs) at the edge computing server (ECS), with the objective of minimizing the overall latency for all EUs to complete their tasks. In spite of the non-convexity of the joint optimization, we identify the structural feature of the optimal offloading solution and propose a layered-algorithm for finding the solution efficiently. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as well as the advantage of our multi-user offloading scheme via NOMA.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as a promising scheme for enabling ultra-high throughput transmission and massive-connectivity in next generation wireless systems. In this paper, we investigate the secrecy-based NOMA transmission for encountering the eavesdropping attack. Exploiting the NOMA-users simultaneous transmission as an artificial jamming, we investigate the joint optimization of NOMA-users’ power allocations and the secrecy-provisioning, with the objective of the effective secure throughput of NOMA-users while ensuring the fairness among them. Despite the non-convexity of the formulated joint optimization problem, we explore its hidden feature and design a search algorithm to compute the optimal solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the performance of our proposed algorithm.1

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising approach for enabling computation-intensive Internet services in future wireless systems. In this paper, we investigate non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted MEC, in which edge-computing users (EUs) adopt NOMA to simultaneously offload part of their computation-workloads to the edge-server (ES). To improve the spectrum-efficiency, we consider a paradigm of underlaying device-to-device (D2D) communications, namely, the EUs reuse a cellular user's (CU's) licensed channel for offloading transmission. We firstly characterize the transmit-powers of EUs and CU in this D2D approach, and then formulate a joint optimization of the EUs' computation- workloads offloading and the ES's computation-resource allocation, with the objective of minimizing the latency in completing the EUs' tasks. In spite of the non-convexity of the formulated problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose an efficient algorithm for computing the optimal solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed NOMA assisted MEC via the D2D sharing 1.

In this paper, we investigate the revenue-sharing based computation-resource allocation for mobile Blockchain, in which conventional mobile devices (i.e., the edge-computing users, EUs) can acquire computation-resources from the edge-server (ES) for increasing their chances of winning the mining game in Blockchain. Meanwhile, as a compensation to the ES, the EUs adopt the revenue-sharing mechanism by sharing parts of their respective rewards to the ES. We formulate a joint optimization of the ES's computation-resource allocation to the EUs and the EUs' revenue-sharing to the ES, with the objective of maximizing the system-reward of all EUs and the ES. Despite the non-convexity of the joint optimization problem, we propose an algorithm based on the cyclic block coordinate descent (CBCD) to solve the problem. Our algorithm decouples the original problem into two subproblems and alternatively optimizes the EUs' revenue-sharing and ES's computation-resource allocation until reaching convergence. For each subproblem, we also propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms, as well as the performance advantage of our proposed revenue-sharing based computation-resource allocation for mobile Blockchain.

With the rapid advancement of electric vehicle (EV) technology, EV has been emerging as a promising transportation due to the low carbon emission. However, the frequent and long time charging is indispensable to continue travelling. During peak hours, EVs further spend long time on the path routing because of the traffic congestion and queuing in the charging stations. Therefore, we study the EV charging scheduling problem that minimizes the total elapsed time which includes charging time for EVs through jointly optimizing the charging path routing and charging station selection in this paper. Considering the NP-hardness of this optimization problem, we propose an efficient EV charging scheduling method to obtain the optimal solution based on crowd sensing through considering the remaining energy in the battery, traffic condition, and the queue length of charging stations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed backtracking method based on crowd sensing can effectively reduce the total elapsed time, in comparison with the greedy algorithm.

Deep learning has recently been successfully applied in automatic modulation classification by extracting and classifying radio features in an end-to-end way. However, deep learning-based radio modulation classifiers are lacking interpretability, and there is little explanation or visibility into what kinds of radio features are extracted and chosen for classification. In this article, we visualize different deep learning-based radio modulation classifiers by introducing a class activation vector. Specifically, both convolutional neural networks (CNN) based classifier and long short-term memory (LSTM) based classifier are separately studied, and their extracted radio features are visualized. We explore different hyperparameter settings via extensive numerical evaluations and show both the CNN-based classifier and LSTM-based classifiers extract similar radio features relating to modulation reference points. In particular, for the LSTM-based classifier, its obtained radio features are similar to the knowledge of human experts. Our numerical results indicate the radio features extracted by deep learning-based classifiers greatly depend on the contents carried by radio signals, and a short radio sample may lead to misclassification.

Traffic offloading through heterogenous small-cell networks (HSCNs) has been envisioned as a cost-efficient approach to accommodate the tremendous traffic growth in cellular networks. In this paper, we investigate an energy-efficient dual-connectivity (DC) enabled traffic offloading through HSCNs, in which small cells are powered in a hybrid manner including both the conventional on-grid power-supply and renewable energy harvested from environment. To achieve a flexible traffic offloading, the emerging DC-enabled traffic offloading in 3GPP specification allows each mobile user (MU) to simultaneously communicate with a macro cell and offload data through a small cell. In spite of saving the on-grid power consumption, powering traffic offloading by energy harvesting (EH) might lead to quality of service degradation, e.g., when the EH power-supply fails to support the required offloading rate. Thus, to reap the benefits of the DC-capability and the EH power-supply, we propose a joint optimization of traffic scheduling and power allocation that aims at minimizing the total on-grid power consumption of macro and small cells, while guaranteeing each served MU’s traffic requirement. We start by studying a representative case of one small cell serving a group of MUs. In spite of the non-convexity of the formulated joint optimization problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose an algorithm that efficiently computes the optimal offloading solution. We further study the scenario of multiple small cells, and investigate how the small cells select different MUs for maximizing the system-wise reward that accounts for the revenue for offloading the MUs’ traffic and the cost of total on-grid power consumption of all cells. We also propose an efficient algorithm to find the optimal MU-selection solution. Numerical results are provided to validate our proposed algorithms and show the advantage of our proposed DC-enabled traffic offloading through the EH-powered small cells.

Multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables mobile users (MUs) to offload their computation-workloads to the computation-servers located at the edge of cellular networks via multi-access radio access, has been considered as a promising technique to address the explosively growing computation-intensive applications in mobile Internet services. In this paper, by exploiting non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for improving the efficiency of multi-access radio transmission, we study the NOMA-enabled multi-access MEC. We aim at minimizing the overall delay of the MUs for finishing their computation requirements, by jointly optimizing the MUs’ offloaded workloads and the NOMA transmission-time. Despite the non-convexity of the formulated joint optimization problem, we propose efficient algorithms to find the optimal offloading solution. For the single-MU case, we exploit the layered structure of the problem and propose an efficient layered algorithm to find the MU's optimal offloading solution that minimizes its overall delay. For the multi-MU case, we propose a distributed algorithm (in which the MUs individually optimize their respective offloaded workloads) to determine the optimal offloading solution for minimizing the sum of all MUs’ overall delay. Extensive numerical results have been provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance advantage of our NOMA-enabled multi-access MEC in comparison with conventional orthogonal multiple access enabled multi-access MEC.

This paper studies mobile edge computing (MEC) networks where multiple wireless devices (WDs) choose to offload their computation tasks to an edge server. To conserve energy and maintain quality of service for WDs, the optimization of joint offloading decision and bandwidth allocation is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem. However, the problem is computationally limited by the curse of dimensionality, which cannot be solved by general optimization tools in an effective and efficient way, especially for large-scale WDs. In this paper, we propose a distributed deep learning-based offloading (DDLO) algorithm for MEC networks, where multiple parallel DNNs are used to generate offloading decisions. We adopt a shared replay memory to store newly generated offloading decisions which are further to train and improve all DNNs. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed DDLO algorithm can generate near-optimal offloading decisions in less than one second.

Time-division multiple access (TDMA) based medium access control (MAC) protocol provides a promising solution to well support delay-sensitive safety applications in vehicular ad hoc networks, since a time-slotted access scheme ensures the transmission within the ultra-low delays. However, due to the varying vehicle mobility, existing TDMA-based MAC protocols may result in collisions of slot assignment when multiple sets of vehicles move together. To avoid slot-assignment collisions, in this paper, we propose a mobility-aware TDMA MAC, named as MoMAC, which can assign every vehicle a time slot according to the underlying road topology and lane distribution on roads with the consideration of vehicles’ mobilities. In MoMAC, different lanes on the same road segment and different road segments at intersections are associated with disjoint time slot sets. In addition, each vehicle broadcasts safety messages together with the time slot occupying information of neighboring vehicles; by updating time slot occupying information of two-hop neighbors (obtained indirectly from one-hop neighbors), vehicles can detect time slot collisions and access a vacant time slot in a fully distributed way. We demonstrate the efficiency of MoMAC through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations; compared with state-of-the-art TDMA MACs, the transmission collisions can be reduced by $59.2\%$ , and the rate of safety message transmissions/receptions can be greatly enhanced.

The emerging non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which enables mobile users (MUs) to share same frequency channel simultaneously, has been considered as a spectrum-efficient multiple access scheme to accommodate tremendous traffic growth in future cellular networks. In this paper, we investigate the NOMA downlink relay-transmission, in which the macro base station (BS) first uses NOMA to transmit to a group of relays, and all relays then use NOMA to transmit their respectively received data to an MU. In specific, we propose an optimal power allocation problem for the BS and relays to maximize the overall throughput delivered to the MU. Despite the non-convexity of the problem, we adopt the vertical decomposition and propose a layered-algorithm to efficiently compute the optimal power allocation solution. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA relay-transmission can increase the throughput up to 30 percent compared with the conventional time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, and we find that increasing the relays’ power capacity can increase the throughput gain of the NOMA relay against the TDMA relay. Furthermore, to improve the throughput under weak channel power gains, we propose a hybrid NOMA (HB-NOMA) relay that adaptively exploits the benefit of NOMA relay and that of the interference-free TDMA relay. By using the throughput provided by the HB-NOMA relay for each individual MU, we study the multi-MUs scenario and investigate the multi-MUs scheduling problem over a long-term period to maximize the overall utility of all MUs. Numerical results demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed multi-MUs scheduling that adopts the HB-NOMA relay-transmission.

The emerging non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered as a promising scheme to reach the goals of 5G cellular systems. By enabling a group of mobile users (MUs) to share a same frequency channel and adopting the successive interference cancellation to mitigate the co-channel interference, NOMA can improve the spectrum efficiency compared with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA). This study proposes a joint optimisation scheme of the channel bandwidth and the transmit-power allocations for the NOMA downlink transmission, which aims at minimising the overall resource consumption cost including both the spectrum consumption and the power consumption, while satisfying the MUs' traffic requirements. In spite of the non-convexity nature of the joint optimisation problem, this study characterises the connection between the channel bandwidth and the associated transmit powers for the MUs. Based on this connection, this study transforms the joint optimisation problem into an equivalent bandwidth optimisation problem, and further proposes an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal bandwidth allocation (which enables us to derive the corresponding transmit powers for the MUs). Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the proposed algorithm and the advantage of the proposed joint channel bandwidth and power allocations for the NOMA transmission.

The rapid growth of mobile traffic has heavily overloaded the cellular networks, making it increasingly desirable to offload mobile users’ (MUs’) traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we study the MUs’ optimal uplink traffic offloading scheme based on the new paradigm of small-cell dual-connectivity (DC). Through DC, an MU can flexibly schedule its traffic between a macro-cell base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two different radio interfaces. To optimize the overall network radio resource usage, we jointly optimize the BS’ bandwidth allocation as well as the MUs’ traffic scheduling and power allocation. Specifically, for reducing the bandwidth usage, the BS prefers to allocate the MUs small amount of bandwidth to encourage the MUs to utilize the small-cell networks. However, excessive traffic offloading can lead to severe interferences among MUs, which increase the MUs’ power consumption. Hence, our joint optimization strikes a proper balance between these two aspects. Despite the non-convexity of the proposed joint optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal offloading solution. The key idea is to exploit the layered-structure of the joint optimization problem, and decompose it into the BS’ bandwidth allocation problem (on the top-level) and the MUs’ traffic scheduling and power allocation problem (as a subproblem). Such a decomposition enables us to exploit the hidden convexity of the MUs’ problem and the monotonic structure of the BS’ problem for an effective algorithm design. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve the global optimum solution with significantly reduced computational time. Moreover, the proposed traffic offloading scheme can significantly reduce the overall system cost, in comparison with using the fixed bandwidth allocation or traffic scheduling schemes.

As cellular networks are evolving toward the fifth generation/long-term evolution systems, cellular radio access networks are expected to provide high throughput and reliable connectivity for massive number of smart devices (SDs), which leads to the emerging narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), a cellular-assisted low-power wide area IoT system. Driven by the potential critical missions, such as transportation safety and video surveillance that require high throughput and low-power consumption, we investigate the small-cell assisted traffic offloading for NB-IoT systems. Taking into account the offloading through small cells operating on unlicensed bands, we account for the secrecy-outage issue in which some malicious eavesdroppers might intentionally overhead the offloaded data delivered to small cells. We first formulate a joint traffic scheduling and power allocation problem to minimize the total power consumption of SDs, while satisfying both the traffic throughput requirement and secrecy-requirement. Despite the nonconvexity of the problem, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal offloading solution. With the per-SD’s optimal offloading solution, we further investigate a multi-SDs multi access-points (APs) scenario, in which different SDs select different APs for providing offloading service to minimize the overall offloading-cost for all SDs. Specifically, we formulate an optimal SD-AP pairing problem to find the optimal pairing between the SDs and APs. Numerical results have been provided to validate our proposed algorithm and show the performance gain of our proposed traffic offloading for the NB-IoT systems.

Traffic offloading through small cells has been considered as a promising approach to accommodate tremendous traffic growth in future heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). The dense deployment of small cells, however, has led to a growing concern about the excessive carbon- based on-grid energy consumption in HCNs. In this article, we first overview the green-oriented traffic offloading in future HCNs that exploits the recent advanced energy technologies including energy harvesting (EH), local energy sharing (ES) enabled by smart grid, and wireless power transfer (WPT). We then discuss the challenges in resource management when exploiting EH, ES, and WPT to support traffic offloading, and provide possible solutions, especially by using the emerging dual connectivity (DC) in recent 3GPP specifications. Furthermore, we present a case study on the optimal DC-enabled traffic offloading through small cells that are powered by EH, with the objective of minimizing the total on-grid power consumption of all small cells and macrocells. The case study validates the benefit of exploiting the DC feature for traffic scheduling and the harvested energy to reduce the total on-grid power consumption. We finally share our view of some research directions in the green-oriented traffic offloading in HCNs.

The growing developments in vehicular networks and vehicular Internet services have yielded a variety of computation-intensive applications, resulting in great pressure on vehicles equipped with limited computation resources. The cloud/ edge-based service, which enables in-motion vehicles to actively offload computation tasks to cloud/ edge servers, has provided a promising approach to address the intensive computation burden. However, due to the possibility of disclosing private data, offloading computation tasks suffers from potential eavesdropping attacks. In this article, we focus on the eavesdropping attack when vehicular users (VUs) deliver computation tasks to cloud/edge servers over radio frequency channels. We take the tool of physical layer security and investigate resource management for secrecy provisioning when the VUs offload computation tasks. We then discuss three promising technologies, including non-orthogonal multiple access, multi-access assisted computation offloading, and mobility- and delay-aware offloading, which facilitate the enhancement of secrecy against the eavesdropping attack. Finally, as a detailed example of the multi-access assisted computation offloading, we present a case study on the optimal dual-connectivity- assisted computation task offloading with secrecy provisioning and show the performance of the proposed computation offloading.

This paper studies energy harvesting sensor networks in green cities that transmit a variety of data packets with different reward values. With the aim to maximize its long-term average transmission reward, almost all the existing optimal energy management strategies are based on the policy iteration algorithm, which suffers from the curse of dimensionality. By contrast, we focus on developing low-complexity optimal policies that can lead to practical implementation. Our main contribution is to propose a threshold-based scheduling policy for energy harvesting sensor networks achieving long-term average rewards. As a result, a sensor node only requires limited memory to store a few optimal value thresholds to perform energy management. Specifically, we propose an algorithm to compute the optimal thresholds, whose complexity is linear with the size of data and energy storage. Numerical results are studied based on real solar radiation data measured at Queensland and show that the optimal expected reward of our proposed scheduling policy approaches its theoretical offline upper bound.

The radio resource management for relay-assisted access where every terminal user communicates with the base station through relay users is studied. In particular, the problem formulation is to maximise the total utility across relay users and terminal users under the bandwidth constraint of device-to-device (D2D) links. To solve such an optimisation problem, the authors first explore the diversity of channels between the relay users and the terminal users based on the maximum weighted bipartite matching theory, and adopt Hungarian algorithm to select the best relay user for each terminal user. Then, to stimulate relay users to participate in the cooperation, they design a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximise the utilities of the selected relay user and the terminal user. In this doing, every terminal user can obtain the optimal data rate with the aid of relay. Finally, the authors' simulations show that the proposed relay user selection and game-theoretic resource allocation scheme can effectively improve the downloading rates of terminal users and achieve a ‘win-win’ strategy between the terminal users and relay users for relay-assisted access using D2D communications.

To meet the growing demand of mobile data traffic in vehicular communications, the vehicle-to-small-cell (V2S) network has been emerging as a promising vehicle-to-infrastructure technology. Since the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with successive interference cancellation (SIC) can achieve superior spectral and energy efficiency, massive connectivity and low transmission latency, we introduce the NOMA with SIC to V2S networks in this paper. Due to the fast vehicle mobility and varying communication environment, it is important to dynamically allocate small-cell base stations and transmit power to vehicular users with considering the vehicle mobility in NOMA-enabled V2S networks. To this end, we present the joint optimization of cell association and power control that maximizes the long-term system-wide utility to enhance the long-term system-wide performance and reduce the handover rate. To solve this optimization problem, we first equivalently transform it into a weighted sum rate maximization problem in each time frame based on the standard gradient-scheduling framework. Then, we propose the hierarchical power control algorithm to maximize the equivalent weighted sum rate in each time frame based on the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions and the idea of successive convex approximation. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the optimal solution satisfying KKT optimality conditions.