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Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is the envisioned future of inter-city aerial transportation. This paper presents a novel, in-flight connectivity link allocation method for UAM, which dynamically switches between terrestrial cellular and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks based on real-time conditions. Our approach prefers cellular networks for cost efficiency, switching to LEO satellites under poor cellular conditions to ensure continuous UAM connectivity. By integrating real-time metrics like signal strength, network congestion, and flight trajectory into the selection process, our algorithm effectively balances cost, minimum data rate requirements, and continuity of communication. Numerical results validate minimization of data-loss while ensuring an optimal selection from the set of available above-threshold data rates at every time sample. Furthermore, insights derived from our study emphasize the importance of hybrid connectivity solutions in ensuring seamless, uninterrupted communication for future urban aerial vehicles., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, conference

The 3D object detection capabilities in urban environments have been enormously improved by recent developments in Light Detection and Range (LiDAR) technology. This paper presents a novel framework that transforms the detection and analysis of 3D objects in traffic scenarios by utilizing the power of elevated LiDAR sensors. We are presenting our methodology's remarkable capacity to collect complex 3D point cloud data, which allows us to accurately and in detail capture the dynamics of urban traffic. Due to the limitation in obtaining real-world traffic datasets, we utilize the simulator to generate 3D point cloud for specific scenarios. To support our experimental analysis, we firstly simulate various 3D point cloud traffic-related objects. Then, we use this dataset as a basis for training and evaluating our 3D object detection models, in identifying and monitoring both vehicles and pedestrians in simulated urban traffic environments. Next, we fine tune the Point Voxel-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (PV-RCNN) architecture, making it more suited to handle and understand the massive volumes of point cloud data generated by our urban traffic simulations. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution in accurately detecting objects in traffic scenes and highlight the role of LiDAR in improving urban safety and advancing intelligent transportation systems.

The integration of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies offers transformative opportunities for public health informatics in urban safety and pedestrian well-being. This paper proposes a novel framework utilizing these technologies for enhanced 3D object detection and activity classification in urban traffic scenarios. By employing elevated LiDAR, we obtain detailed 3D point cloud data, enabling precise pedestrian activity monitoring. To overcome urban data scarcity, we create a specialized dataset through simulated traffic environments in Blender, facilitating targeted model training. Our approach employs a modified Point Voxel-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (PV-RCNN) for robust 3D detection and PointNet for classifying pedestrian activities, significantly benefiting urban traffic management and public health by offering insights into pedestrian behavior and promoting safer urban environments. Our dual-model approach not only enhances urban traffic management but also contributes significantly to public health by providing insights into pedestrian behavior and promoting safer urban environment.

In this work, we propose a novel learning-based model predictive control (MPC) framework for motion planning and control of urban self-driving. In this framework, instantaneous references and cost functions of online MPC are learned from raw sensor data without relying on any oracle or predicted states of traffic. Moreover, driving safety conditions are latently encoded via the introduction of a learnable instantaneous reference vector. In particular, we implement a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for policy search, where practical and lightweight raw observations are processed to reason about the traffic and provide the online MPC with instantaneous references. The proposed approach is validated in a high-fidelity simulator, where our development manifests remarkable adaptiveness to complex and dynamic traffic. Furthermore, sim-to-real deployments are also conducted to evaluate the generalizability of the proposed framework in various real-world applications. Also, we provide the open-source code and video demonstrations at the project website: https://latent-mpc.github.io/.

Lane change in dense traffic typically requires the recognition of an appropriate opportunity for maneuvers, which remains a challenging problem in self-driving. In this work, we propose a chance-aware lane-change strategy with high-level model predictive control (MPC) through curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL). In our proposed framework, full-state references and regulatory factors concerning the relative importance of each cost term in the embodied MPC are generated by a neural policy. Furthermore, effective curricula are designed and integrated into an episodic reinforcement learning (RL) framework with policy transfer and enhancement, to improve the convergence speed and ensure a high-quality policy. The proposed framework is deployed and evaluated in numerical simulations of dense and dynamic traffic. It is noteworthy that, given a narrow chance, the proposed approach generates high-quality lane-change maneuvers such that the vehicle merges into the traffic flow with a high success rate of 96%. Finally, our framework is validated in the high-fidelity simulator under dense traffic, demonstrating satisfactory practicality and generalizability., Comment: The paper has been accepted by ICRA 2024

Medical imaging often contains critical fine-grained features, such as tumors or hemorrhages, crucial for diagnosis yet potentially too subtle for detection with conventional methods. In this paper, we introduce \textit{DIA}, dissolving is amplifying. DIA is a fine-grained anomaly detection framework for medical images. First, we introduce \textit{dissolving transformations}. We employ diffusion with a generative diffusion model as a dedicated feature-aware denoiser. Applying diffusion to medical images in a certain manner can remove or diminish fine-grained discriminative features. Second, we introduce an \textit{amplifying framework} based on contrastive learning to learn a semantically meaningful representation of medical images in a self-supervised manner, with a focus on fine-grained features. The amplifying framework contrasts additional pairs of images with and without dissolving transformations applied and thereby emphasizes the dissolved fine-grained features. DIA significantly improves the medical anomaly detection performance with around 18.40\% AUC boost against the baseline method and achieves an overall SOTA against other benchmark methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/shijianjian/DIA.git}.

Edge Computing (EC) is about remodeling the way data is handled, processed, and delivered within a vast heterogeneous network. One of the fundamental concepts of EC is to push the data processing near the edge by exploiting front-end devices with powerful computation capabilities. Thus, limiting the use of centralized architecture, such as cloud computing, to only when it is necessary. This paper proposes a novel edge computer offloading technique that assigns computational tasks generated by devices to potential edge computers with enough computational resources. The proposed approach clusters the edge computers based on their hardware specifications. Afterwards, the tasks generated by devices will be fed to a hybrid Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model that predicts, based on these tasks, the profiles, i.e., features, of the edge computers with enough computational resources to execute them. The predicted edge computers are then assigned to the cluster they belong to so that each task is assigned to a cluster of edge computers. Finally, we choose for each task the edge computer that is expected to provide the fastest response time. The experiment results show that our proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art machine learning approaches using real-world IoT dataset., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, conference

Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks intelligently connect thousands of physical entities to provide various services for the community. It is witnessing an exponential expansion, which is complicating the process of discovering IoT devices existing in the network and requesting corresponding services from them. As the highly dynamic nature of the IoT environment hinders the use of traditional solutions of service discovery, we aim, in this paper, to address this issue by proposing a scalable resource allocation neural model adequate for heterogeneous large-scale IoT networks. We devise a Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach that utilizes the social relationships formed between the devices in the IoT network to reduce the search space of any entity lookup and acquire a service from another device in the network. This proposed resource allocation approach surpasses standardization issues and embeds the structure and characteristics of the social IoT graph, by the means of GNNs, for eventual clustering analysis process. Simulation results applied on a real-world dataset illustrate the performance of this solution and its significant efficiency to operate on large-scale IoT networks., Comment: Accepted for publications in the 65 IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS'22) 7 figures, 1 table, 5 pages

Driver behavior profiling is one of the main issues in the insurance industries and fleet management, thus being able to classify the driver behavior with low-cost mobile applications remains in the spotlight of autonomous driving. However, using mobile sensors may face the challenge of security, privacy, and trust issues. To overcome those challenges, we propose to collect data sensors using Carla Simulator available in smartphones (Accelerometer, Gyroscope, GPS) in order to classify the driver behavior using speed, acceleration, direction, the 3-axis rotation angles (Yaw, Pitch, Roll) taking into account the speed limit of the current road and weather conditions to better identify the risky behavior. Secondly, after fusing inter-axial data from multiple sensors into a single file, we explore different machine learning algorithms for time series classification to evaluate which algorithm results in the highest performance., Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2022), Austin, TX, USA, May 2022

Collaborative Mobile crowdsourcing (CMCS) allows entities, e.g., local authorities or individuals, to hire a team of workers from the crowd of connected people, to execute complex tasks. In this paper, we investigate two different CMCS recruitment strategies allowing task requesters to form teams of socially connected and skilled workers: i) a platform-based strategy where the platform exploits its own knowledge about the workers to form a team and ii) a leader-based strategy where the platform designates a group leader that recruits its own suitable team given its own knowledge about its Social Network (SN) neighbors. We first formulate the recruitment as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) that optimally forms teams according to four fuzzy-logic-based criteria: level of expertise, social relationship strength, recruitment cost, and recruiter's confidence level. To cope with NP-hardness, we design a novel low-complexity CMCS recruitment approach relying on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), specifically graph embedding and clustering techniques, to shrink the workers' search space and afterwards, exploiting a meta-heuristic genetic algorithm to select appropriate workers. Simulation results applied on a real-world dataset illustrate the performance of both proposed CMCS recruitment approaches. It is shown that our proposed low-complexity GNN-based recruitment algorithm achieves close performances to those of the baseline ILP with significant computational time saving and ability to operate on large-scale mobile crowdsourcing platforms. It is also shown that compared to the leader-based strategy, the platform-based strategy recruits a more skilled team but with lower SN relationships and higher cost., Comment: 16 pages, 20 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publications in IEEE Internet-of-things Journal

Currently, the world is in the midst of a severe global pandemic, which has affected all aspects of people's lives. As a result, there is a deluge of COVID-related digital media articles published in the United States, due to the disparate effects of the pandemic. This large volume of information is difficult to consume by the audience in a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, we develop a Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline that is capable of automatically distilling various digital articles into manageable pieces of information, while also modelling the progression topics discussed over time in order to aid readers in rapidly gaining holistic perspectives on pressing issues (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic) from a diverse array of sources. We achieve these goals by first collecting a large corpus of COVID-related articles during the onset of the pandemic. After, we apply unsupervised and semi-supervised learning procedures to summarize articles, then cluster them based on their similarities using the community detection methods. Next, we identify the topic of each cluster of articles using the BART algorithm. Finally, we provide a detailed digital media analysis based on the NLP-pipeline outputs and show how the conversation surrounding COVID-19 evolved over time.

Mobile Crowdsourcing (MC) is an effective way of engaging large groups of smart devices to perform tasks remotely while exploiting their built-in features. It has drawn great attention in the areas of smart cities and urban computing communities to provide decentralized, fast, and flexible ubiquitous technological services. The vast majority of previous studies focused on non-cooperative MC schemes in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Advanced collaboration strategies are expected to leverage the capability of MC services and enable the execution of more complicated crowdsourcing tasks. In this context, Collaborative Mobile Crowdsourcing (CMC) enables task requesters to hire groups of IoT devices' users that must communicate with each other and coordinate their operational activities in order to accomplish complex tasks. In this paper, we present and discuss the novel CMC paradigm in IoT. Then, we provide a detailed taxonomy to classify the different components forming CMC systems. Afterwards, we investigate the challenges in designing CMC tasks and discuss different team formation strategies involving the crowdsourcing platform and selected team leaders. We also analyze and compare the performances of certain proposed CMC recruitment algorithms. Finally, we shed the light on open research directions to leverage CMC service design., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for Publication in IEEE Internet-of-Things Magazine (IoT-M)

The unprecedented worldwide spread of coronavirus disease has significantly sped up the development of technology-based solutions to prevent, combat, monitor, or predict pandemics and/or its evolution. The omnipresence of smart Internet-of-things (IoT) devices can play a predominant role in designing advanced techniques helping in minimizing the risk of contamination. In this paper, we propose a practical framework that uses the Social IoT (SIoT) concept to improve pedestrians safely navigate through a real-wold map of a smart city. The objective is to mitigate the risks of exposure to the virus in high-dense areas where social distancing might not be well-practiced. The proposed routing approach recommends pedestrians' route in a real-time manner while considering other devices' mobility. First, the IoT devices are clustered into communities according to two SIoT relations that consider the devices' locations and the friendship levels among their owners. Accordingly, the city map roads are assigned weights representing their safety levels. Afterward, a navigation algorithm, namely the Dijkstra algorithm, is applied to recommend the safest route to follow. Simulation results applied on a real-world IoT data set have shown the ability of the proposed approach in achieving trade-offs between both safest and shortest paths according to the pedestrian preference., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, conference

Crowd management technologies that leverage computer vision are widespread in contemporary times. There exists many security-related applications of these methods, including, but not limited to: following the flow of an array of people and monitoring large gatherings. In this paper, we propose an accurate monitoring system composed of two concatenated convolutional deep learning architectures. The first part called Front-end, is responsible for converting bi-dimensional signals and delivering high-level features. The second part, called the Back-end, is a dilated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) used to replace pooling layers. It is responsible for enlarging the receptive field of the whole network and converting the descriptors provided by the first network to a saliency map that will be utilized to estimate the number of people in highly congested images. We also propose to utilize a genetic algorithm in order to find an optimized dilation rate configuration in the back-end. The proposed model is shown to converge 30\% faster than state-of-the-art approaches. It is also shown that it achieves 20\% lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) when applied to the Shanghai data~set.

Elevated LiDAR (ELiD) has the potential to hasten the deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AV), as ELiD can reduce energy expenditures associated with AVs, and can also be utilized for other intelligent Transportation Systems applications such as urban 3D mapping. In this paper, we address the need for a planning framework in order for ITS operators to have an effective tool for determining what resources are required to achieve a desired level of coverage of urban roadways. To this end, we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear constrained optimization problem, with the aim of maximizing effective area coverage of a roadway, while satisfying energy and throughput capacity constraints. Due to the non-linearity of the problem, we utilize Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to solve the problem. After demonstrating its effectiveness in finding a solution for a realistic scenario, we perform a sensitivity analysis to test the model's general ability., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, conference

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a challenging graph task in combinatorial optimization that requires reasoning about both local node neighborhoods and global graph structure. In this paper, we propose to use the novel Graph Learning Network (GLN), a generative approach, to approximately solve the TSP. GLN model learns directly the pattern of TSP instances as training dataset, encodes the graph properties, and merge the different node embeddings to output node-to-node an optimal tour directly or via graph search technique that validates the final tour. The preliminary results of the proposed novel approach proves its applicability to this challenging problem providing a low optimally gap with significant computation saving compared to the optimal solution., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, conference

The heterogeneity of the Internet-of-things (IoT) network can be exploited as a dynamic computational resource environment for many devices lacking computational capabilities. A smart mechanism for allocating edge and mobile computers to match the need of devices requesting external computational resources is developed. In this paper, we employ the concept of Social IoT and machine learning to downgrade the complexity of allocating appropriate edge computers. We propose a framework that detects different communities of devices in SIoT enclosing trustworthy peers having strong social relations. Afterwards, we train a machine learning algorithm, considering multiple computational and non-computational features of the requester as well as the edge computers, to predict the total time needed to process the required task by the potential candidates belonging to the same community of the requester. By applying it to a real-world data set, we observe that the proposed framework provides encouraging results for mobile computer allocation., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, conference

In this paper, we propose a machine learning process for clustering large-scale social Internet-of-things (SIoT) devices into several groups of related devices sharing strong relations. To this end, we generate undirected weighted graphs based on the historical dataset of IoT devices and their social relations. Using the adjacency matrices of these graphs and the IoT devices' features, we embed the graphs' nodes using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to obtain numerical vector representations of the IoT devices. The vector representation does not only reflect the characteristics of the device but also its relations with its peers. The obtained node embeddings are then fed to a conventional unsupervised learning algorithm to determine the clusters accordingly. We showcase the obtained IoT groups using two well-known clustering algorithms, specifically the K-means and the density-based algorithm for discovering clusters (DBSCAN). Finally, we compare the performances of the proposed GNN-based clustering approach in terms of coverage and modularity to those of the deterministic Louvain community detection algorithm applied solely on the graphs created from the different relations. It is shown that the framework achieves promising preliminary results in clustering large-scale IoT systems., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, conference

Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) is the generalized act of outsourcing sensing tasks, traditionally performed by employees or contractors, to a large group of smart-phone users by means of an open call. With the increasing complexity of the crowdsourcing applications, requesters find it essential to harness the power of collaboration among the workers by forming teams of skilled workers satisfying their complex tasks' requirements. This type of MCS is called Collaborative MCS (CMCS). Previous CMCS approaches have mainly focused only on the aspect of team skills maximization. Other team formation studies on social networks (SNs) have only focused on social relationship maximization. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach where requesters are able to hire a team that, not only has the required expertise, but also is socially connected and can accomplish tasks collaboratively. Because team formation in CMCS is proven to be NP-hard, we develop a stochastic algorithm that exploit workers knowledge about their SN neighbors and asks a designated leader to recruit a suitable team. The proposed algorithm is inspired from the optimal stopping strategies and uses the odds-algorithm to compute its output. Experimental results show that, compared to the benchmark exponential optimal solution, the proposed approach reduces computation time and produces reasonable performance results., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in 2019 31st International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)

Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) photo-based is an arising field of interest and a trending topic in the domain of ubiquitous computing. It has recently drawn substantial attention of the smart cities and urban computing communities. In fact, the built-in cameras of mobile devices are becoming the most common way for visual logging techniques in our daily lives. MCS photo-based frameworks collect photos in a distributed way in which a large number of contributors upload photos whenever and wherever it is suitable. This inevitably leads to evolving picture streams which possibly contain misleading and redundant information that affects the task result. In order to overcome these issues, we develop, in this paper, a solution for selecting highly relevant data from an evolving picture stream and ensuring correct submission. The proposed photo-based MCS framework for event reporting incorporates (i) a deep learning model to eliminate false submissions and ensure photos credibility and (ii) an A-Tree shape data structure model for clustering streaming pictures to reduce information redundancy and provide maximum event coverage. Simulation results indicate that the implemented framework can effectively reduce false submissions and select a subset with high utility coverage with low redundancy ratio from the streaming data., Comment: Published in 2019 IEEE 62nd International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS)

The wide spread of mobile devices has enabled a new paradigm of innovation called Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) where the concept is to allow entities, e.g., individuals or local authorities, to hire workers to help from the crowd of connected people, to execute a task or service. Some complex tasks require the collaboration of multiple workers to ensure its successful completion. In this context, the task requester needs to hire a group of socially connected and collaborative workers that, at the same time, have sufficient skills to accomplish the task. In this paper, we develop two recruitment strategies for collaborative MCS frameworks in which, virtual teams are formed according to four different criteria: level of expertise, social relationship strength, recruitment cost, and recruiter's confidence level. The first proposed strategy is a platform-based approach which exploits the platform knowledge to form the team. The second one is a leader-based approach that uses team members' knowledge about their social network (SN) neighbors to designate a group leader that recruits its suitable team. Both approaches are modeled as integer linear programs resulting in optimal team formation. Experimental results show a performance trade-off between the two virtual team grouping strategies when varying the members SN edge degree. Compared to the leader-based strategy, the platform-based strategy recruits a more skilled team but with lower SN relationships and higher cost., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in 2020 IEEE Technology & Engineering Management Conference (TEMSCON)

Modern urbanization is demanding smarter technologies to improve a variety of applications in intelligent transportation systems to relieve the increasing amount of vehicular traffic congestion and incidents. Existing incident detection techniques are limited to the use of sensors in the transportation network and hang on human-inputs. Despite of its data abundance, social media is not well-exploited in such context. In this paper, we develop an automated traffic alert system based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that filters this flood of information and extract important traffic-related bullets. To this end, we employ the fine-tuning Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language embedding model to filter the related traffic information from social media. Then, we apply a question-answering model to extract necessary information characterizing the report event such as its exact location, occurrence time, and nature of the events. We demonstrate the adopted NLP approaches outperform other existing approach and, after effectively training them, we focus on real-world situation and show how the developed approach can, in real-time, extract traffic-related information and automatically convert them into alerts for navigation assistance applications such as navigation apps., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology Engineering Management Society International Conference (TEMSCON'20), Metro Detroit, Michigan (USA)

Internet-of-things (IoT) is perpetually revolutionizing our daily life and rapidly transforming physical objects into an ubiquitous connected ecosystem. Due to their massive deployment and moderate security levels, those devices face a lot of security, management, and control challenges. Their classical centralized architecture is still cloaking vulnerabilities and anomalies that can be exploited by hackers for spying, eavesdropping, and taking control of the network. In this paper, we propose to improve the IoT architecture with additional security features using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology. We propose a novel architecture based on permissioned blockchain technology in order to build a scalable and decentralized end-to-end secure IoT system. Furthermore, we enhance the IoT system security with an AI-component at the gateway level to detect and classify suspected activities, malware, and cyber-attacks using machine learning techniques. Simulations and practical implementation show that the proposed architecture delivers high performance against cyber-attacks., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology & Engineering Management Conference (TEMSCON'20), Detroit, USA, jun, 2020

In this paper, we propose two automated text processing frameworks specifically designed to analyze online reviews. The objective of the first framework is to summarize the reviews dataset by extracting essential sentence. This is performed by converting sentences into numerical vectors and clustering them using a community detection algorithm based on their similarity levels. Afterwards, a correlation score is measured for each sentence to determine its importance level in each cluster and assign it as a tag for that community. The second framework is based on a question-answering neural network model trained to extract answers to multiple different questions. The collected answers are effectively clustered to find multiple distinct answers to a single question that might be asked by a customer. The proposed frameworks are shown to be more comprehensive than existing reviews processing solutions., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology Engineering Management Society International Conference (TEMSCON'20), Metro Detroit, Michigan (USA)

Spatial Mobile Crowdsourcing (SMCS) can be leveraged by exploiting the capabilities of the Social Internet-of-Things (SIoT) to execute spatial tasks. Typically, in SMCS, a task requester aims to recruit a subset of IoT devices and commission them to travel to the task location. However, because of the exponential increase of IoT networks and their diversified devices (e.g., multiple brands, different communication channels, etc.), recruiting the appropriate devices/workers is becoming a challenging task. To this end, in this paper, we develop a recruitment process for SMCS platforms using automated SIoT service discovery to select trustworthy workers satisfying the requester requirements. The method we purpose includes mainly two stages: 1) a worker filtering stage, aiming at reducing the workers' search space to a subset of potential trustworthy candidates using the Louvain community detection algorithm (CD) applied to SIoT relation graphs. Next, 2) a selection process stage that uses an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to determine the final set of selected devices/workers. The ILP maximizes a worker efficiency metric incorporating the skills/specs level, recruitment cost, and trustworthiness level of the recruited IoT devices. Selected experiments analyze the performance of the proposed CD-ILP algorithm using a real-world dataset and show its superiority in providing an effective recruitment strategy compared to an existing stochastic algorithm., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, conference

In this paper, we propose to design an automated service discovery process to allow mobile crowdsourcing task requesters select a small set of devices out of a large-scale Internet-of-things (IoT) network to execute their tasks. To this end, we proceed by dividing the large-scale IoT network into several virtual communities whose members share strong social IoT relations. Two community detection algorithms, namely Louvain and order statistics local method (OSLOM) algorithms, are investigated and applied to a real-world IoT dataset to form non-overlapping and overlapping IoT devices groups. Afterwards, a natural language process (NLP)-based approach is executed to handle crowdsourcing textual requests and accordingly find the list of IoT devices capable of effectively accomplishing the tasks. This is performed by matching the NLP outputs, e.g., type of application, location, required trustworthiness level, with the different detected communities. The proposed approach effectively helps in automating and reducing the service discovery procedure and recruitment process for mobile crowdsourcing applications., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, conference

In this paper, we propose an autonomous UAV path planning framework using deep reinforcement learning approach. The objective is to employ a self-trained UAV as a flying mobile unit to reach spatially distributed moving or static targets in a given three dimensional urban area. In this approach, a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) with continuous action space is designed to train the UAV to navigate through or over the obstacles to reach its assigned target. A customized reward function is developed to minimize the distance separating the UAV and its destination while penalizing collisions. Numerical simulations investigate the behavior of the UAV in learning the environment and autonomously determining trajectories for different selected scenarios., Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS'20), Seville, Spain, Oct. 2020

Recently, elevated LiDAR (ELiD) has been proposed as an alternative to local LiDAR sensors in autonomous vehicles (AV) because of the ability to reduce costs and computational requirements of AVs, reduce the number of overlapping sensors mapping an area, and to allow for a multiplicity of LiDAR sensing applications with the same shared LiDAR map data. Since ELiDs have been removed from the vehicle, their data must be processed externally in the cloud or on the edge, necessitating an optimized backhaul system that allocates data efficiently to compute servers. In this paper, we address this need for an optimized backhaul system by formulating a mixed-integer programming problem that minimizes the average latency of the uplink and downlink hop-by-hop transmission plus computation time for each ELiD while considering different bandwidth allocation schemes. We show that our model is capable of allocating resources for differing topologies, and we perform a sensitivity analysis that demonstrates the robustness of our problem formulation under different circumstances., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, conference

This paper proposes an energy management framework for cellular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) supported by dynamic solar powered drones. A HetNet composed of a macrocell base station (BS), micro cell BSs, and drone small cell BSs are deployed to serve the networks' subscribers. The drones can land at pre-planned locations defined by the mobile operator and at the macrocell BS site where they can charge their batteries. The objective of the framework is to jointly determine the optimal trips of the drones and the MBSs that can be safely turned off in order to minimize the total energy consumption of the network. This is done while considering the cells' capacities and the minimum receiving power guaranteeing successful communications. To do so, an integer linear programming problem is formulated and optimally solved for three cases based on the knowledge level about future renewable energy statistics of the drones. A low complex relaxed solution is also developed. Its performances are shown to be close to those of the optimal solutions. However, the gap increases as the network becomes more congested. Numerical results investigate the performance of the proposed drone-based approach and show notable improvements in terms of energy saving and network capacity.

Future mobile traffic growth will require 5G cellular networks to densify the deployment of small cell base stations (BS). As it is not feasible to form a backhaul (BH) by wiring all BSs to the core network, directional mmWave links can be an attractive solution to form BH links, due to their large available capacity. When small cells are powered on/off or traffic demands change, the BH may require reconfiguration, leading to topology and traffic routing changes. Ideally, such reconfiguration should be seamless and should not impact existing traffic. However, when using highly directional BH antennas which can be dynamically rotated to form new links, this can become time-consuming, requiring the coordination of BH interface movements, link establishment and traffic routing. In this paper, we propose greedy-based heuristic algorithms to solve the BH reconfiguration problem in real-time. We numerically compare the proposed algorithms with the optimal solution obtained by solving a mixed integer linear program (MILP) for smaller instances, and with a sub-optimal reduced MILP for larger instances. The obtained results indicate that the greedy-based algorithms achieve good quality solutions with significantly decreased execution time., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. To be presented at IEEE Globecom 2019

With the emergence of millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communication technology, the capacity of mobile backhaul networks can be significantly increased. On the other hand, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides an appropriate infrastructure to offload latency-sensitive tasks. However, the amount of resources in MEC servers is typically limited. Therefore, it is important to intelligently manage the MEC task offloading by optimizing the backhaul bandwidth and edge server resource allocation in order to decrease the overall latency of the offloaded tasks. This paper investigates the task allocation problem in MEC environment, where the mmWave technology is used in the backhaul network. We formulate a Mixed Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP) problem with the goal to minimize the total task serving time. Its objective is to determine an optimized network topology, identify which server is used to process a given offloaded task, find the path of each user task, and determine the allocated bandwidth to each task on mmWave backhaul links. Because the problem is difficult to solve, we develop a two-step approach. First, a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) determining the network topology and the routing paths is optimally solved. Then, the fractions of bandwidth allocated to each user task are optimized by solving a quasi-convex problem. Numerical results illustrate the obtained topology and routing paths for selected scenarios and show that optimizing the bandwidth allocation significantly improves the total serving time, particularly for bandwidth-intensive tasks.

Future 5G mobile networks will require increased backhaul (BH) capacity to connect a massive amount of high capacity small cells (SCs) to the network. Because having an optical connection to each SC might be infeasible, mmWave-based (e.g. 60 GHz) BH links are an interesting alternative due to their large available bandwidth. To cope with the increased path loss, mmWave links require directional antennas that should be able to direct their beams to different neighbors, to dynamically change the BH topology, in case new nodes are powered on/off or the traffic demand has changed. Such BH adaptation needs to be orchestrated to minimize the impact on existing traffic. This paper develops a Software-defined networking-based framework that guides the optimal reconfiguration of mesh BH networks composed by mmWave links, where antennas need to be mechanically aligned. By modelling the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), its solution returns the optimal ordering of events necessary to transition between two BH network configurations. The model creates backup paths whenever it is possible, while minimizing the packet loss of ongoing flows. A numerical evaluation with different topologies and traffic demands shows that increasing the number of BH interfaces per SC from 2 to 4 can decrease the total loss by more than 50%. Moreover, when increasing the total reconfiguration time, additional backup paths can be created, consequently reducing the reconfiguration impact on existing traffic.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained a lot of popularity in diverse wireless communication fields. They can act as high-altitude flying relays to support communications between ground nodes due to their ability to provide line-of-sight links. With the flourishing Internet of Things, several types of new applications are emerging. In this paper, we focus on bandwidth hungry and delay-tolerant applications where multiple pairs of transceivers require the support of UAVs to complete their transmissions. To do so, the UAVs have the possibility to employ two different bands namely the typical microwave and the high-rate millimeter wave bands. In this paper, we develop a generic framework to assign UAVs to supported transceivers and optimize their trajectories such that a weighted function of the total service time is minimized. Taking into account both the communication time needed to relay the message and the flying time of the UAVs, a mixed non-linear programming problem aiming at finding the stops at which the UAVs hover to forward the data to the receivers is formulated. An iterative approach is then developed to solve the problem. First, a mixed linear programming problem is optimally solved to determine the path of each available UAV. Then, a hierarchical iterative search is executed to enhance the UAV stops' locations and reduce the service time. The behavior of the UAVs and the benefits of the proposed framework are showcased for selected scenarios., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, conference Globecom 2018

Energy harvesting (EH) combined with cooperative communications constitutes a promising solution for future wireless technologies. They enable additional efficiency and increased lifetime to wireless networks. This paper investigates a multiple-relay selection scheme for an EH-based two-way relaying (TWR) system. All relays are considered as EH nodes that harvest energy from renewable energy and radio frequency (RF) sources. Some of them are selected to forward data to the destinations. The power splitting (PS) protocol, by which the EH node splits the input RF signal into two components for EH and information transmission, is adopted at the relay nodes. The objective is to jointly optimize i) the set of selected relays, ii) their PS ratios, and iii) their transmit power levels in order to maximize data rate-based utilities over multiple coherent time slots. A joint-optimization solution based on geometric programming (GP) and binary particle swarm optimization is proposed to solve non-convex problems for two utility functions reflecting the level of fairness in the TWR transmission. Numerical results illustrate the system's behavior versus various parameters and show that the performance of the proposed scheme is very close to that of the optimal branch-and-bound method and that GP outperforms the dual problem-based method.

This paper proposes and investigates a green virtualization framework for infrastructure sharing among multiple cellular operators whose networks are powered by a combination of conventional and renewable sources of energy. Under the proposed framework, the virtual network formed by unifying radio access infrastructures of all operators is optimized for minimum energy consumption by deactivating base stations (BSs) with low traffic loads. The users initially associated to those BSs are off-loaded to neighboring active ones. A fairness criterion for collaboration based on roaming prices is introduced to cover the additional energy costs incurred by host operators. The framework also ensures that any collaborating operator is not negatively affected by its participation in the proposed virtualization. A multi-objective linear programming problem is formulated to achieve energy and cost efficiency of the networks' operation by identifying the set of inter-operator roaming prices. For the case when collaboration among all operators is infeasible due to profitability, capacity, or power constraints, an iterative algorithm is proposed to determine the groups of operators that can viably collaborate. Results show significant energy savings using the proposed virtualization as compared to the standalone case. Moreover, collaborative operators exploiting locally generated renewable energy are rewarded more than traditional ones., Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking

Cellular operators are increasingly turning towards renewable energy (RE) as an alternative to using traditional electricity in order to reduce operational expenditure and carbon footprint. Due to the randomness in both RE generation and mobile traffic at each base station (BS), a surplus or shortfall of energy may occur at any given time. To increase energy self-reliance and minimize the network's energy cost, the operator needs to efficiently exploit the RE generated across all BSs. In this paper, a hybrid energy sharing framework for cellular network is proposed, where a combination of physical power lines and energy trading with other BSs using smart grid is used. Algorithms for physical power lines deployment between BSs, based on average and complete statistics of the net RE available, are developed. Afterwards, an energy management framework is formulated to optimally determine the quantities of electricity and RE to be procured and exchanged among BSs, respectively, while considering battery capacities and real-time energy pricing. Three cases are investigated where RE generation is unknown, perfectly known, and partially known ahead of time. Results investigate the time varying energy management of BSs and demonstrate considerable reduction in average energy cost thanks to the hybrid energy sharing scheme., Comment: 16 pages 8 figures in IEEE Transactions on Communications 2017

In this paper, the production decisions across multiple energy suppliers in smart grid, powering cellular networks are investigated. The suppliers are characterized by different offered prices and pollutant emissions levels. The challenge is to decide the amount of energy provided by each supplier to each of the operators such that their profitability is maximized while respecting the maximum tolerated level of CO2 emissions. The cellular operators are characterized by their offered quality of service (QoS) to the subscribers and the number of users that determines their energy requirements. Stochastic geometry is used to determine the average power needed to achieve the target probability of coverage for each operator. The total average power requirements of all networks are fed to an optimization framework to find the optimal amount of energy to be provided from each supplier to the operators. The generalized $\alpha$-fair utility function is used to avoid production bias among the suppliers based on profitability of generation. Results illustrate the production behavior of the energy suppliers versus QoS level, cost of energy, capacity of generation, and level of fairness., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

In this paper, the problem of energy efficiency in cellular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is investigated using radio resource and power management combined with the base station (BS) ON/OFF switching. The objective is to minimize the total power consumption of the network while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirements of each connected user. We consider the case of co-existing macrocell BS, small cell BSs, and private femtocell access points (FAPs). Three different network scenarios are investigated, depending on the status of the FAPs, i.e., HetNets without FAPs, HetNets with closed FAPs, and HetNets with semi-closed FAPs. A unified framework is proposed to simultaneously allocate spectrum resources to users in an energy efficient manner and switch off redundant small cell BSs. The high complexity dual decomposition technique is employed to achieve optimal solutions for the problem. A low complexity iterative algorithm is also proposed and its performances are compared to those of the optimal technique. The particularly interesting case of semi-closed FAPs, in which the FAPs accept to serve external users, achieves the highest energy efficiency due to increased degrees of freedom. In this paper, a cooperation scheme between FAPs and mobile operator is also investigated. The incentives for FAPs, e.g., renewable energy sharing and roaming prices, enabling cooperation are discussed to be considered as a useful guideline for inter-operator agreements., Comment: 15 pages, 9 Figures, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 2017