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The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based tasks to the ecosystem of vehicular networks. These tasks are often computation-intensive, requiring substantial computation resources, which are beyond the capability of a single vehicle. To address this challenge, Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) has emerged as a solution, offering computing services for DNN-based tasks through resource pooling via Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure (V2V/V2I) communications. In this paper, we formulate the problem of joint DNN partitioning, task offloading, and resource allocation in VEC as a dynamic long-term optimization. Our objective is to minimize the DNN-based task completion time while guaranteeing the system stability over time. To this end, we first leverage a Lyapunov optimization technique to decouple the original long-term optimization with stability constraints into a per-slot deterministic problem. Afterwards, we propose a Multi-Agent Diffusion-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (MAD2RL) algorithm, incorporating the innovative use of diffusion models to determine the optimal DNN partitioning and task offloading decisions. Furthermore, we integrate convex optimization techniques into MAD2RL as a subroutine to allocate computation resources, enhancing the learning efficiency. Through simulations under real-world movement traces of vehicles, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared to existing benchmark solutions., Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, and with extra appendix

Information acquisition from target perception represents the key enabling technology of the Internet of Automatic Vehicles (IoAV), which is essential for the decision-making and control operation of connected automatic vehicles (CAVs). Exploring target information involves multiple operations on data, e.g., wireless sensing (for data acquisition), communication (for data transmission), and computing (for data analysis), which all rely on the consumption of time-space-frequency-computing (TSFC) multi-domain resources. Due to the coupled resource sharing of sensing, communication, and computing procedures, the resource management of information-oriented IoAV is commonly formulated as a non-convex NP-hard problem. In this article, further combining the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and computing, we introduce the integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC), wherein the TSFC resources are decoupled from the specific processes and shared universally among sensing, communication, and computing processes. Furthermore, the information-oriented resource trading platform (IRTP) is established, which transforms the problem of ISCC resource management into a resource-information substitution model. Finally, we embed the employment topology structure in IoAV into neural network architecture, taking advantage of the graph neural network (GNN) and multi-worker reinforcement learning, and propose the dynamic resource management strategy based on the asynchronous advantage GNN (A2GNN) algorithm, which can achieve the convergence both of information gain maximization and resource consumption minimization, realizing efficient information-oriented resource management., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

The high-performance generative artificial intelligence (GAI) represents the latest evolution of computational intelligence, while the blessing of future 6G networks also makes edge intelligence (EI) full of development potential. The inevitable encounter between GAI and EI can unleash new opportunities, where GAI's pre-training based on massive computing resources and large-scale unlabeled corpora can provide strong foundational knowledge for EI, while EI can harness fragmented computing resources to aggregate personalized knowledge for GAI. However, the natural contradictory features pose significant challenges to direct knowledge sharing. To address this, in this paper, we propose the GAI-oriented synthetical network (GaisNet), a collaborative cloud-edge-end intelligence framework that buffers contradiction leveraging data-free knowledge relay, where the bidirectional knowledge flow enables GAI's virtuous-cycle model fine-tuning and task inference, achieving mutualism between GAI and EI with seamless fusion and collaborative evolution. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the future challenges and directions in the interplay between GAI and EI., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, and 5 tables

The rapid expansion of AI-generated content (AIGC) reflects the iteration from assistive AI towards generative AI (GAI) with creativity. Meanwhile, the 6G networks will also evolve from the Internet-of-everything to the Internet-of-intelligence with hybrid heterogeneous network architectures. In the future, the interplay between GAI and the 6G will lead to new opportunities, where GAI can learn the knowledge of personalized data from the massive connected 6G end devices, while GAI's powerful generation ability can provide advanced network solutions for 6G network and provide 6G end devices with various AIGC services. However, they seem to be an odd couple, due to the contradiction of data and resources. To achieve a better-coordinated interplay between GAI and 6G, the GAI-native networks (GainNet), a GAI-oriented collaborative cloud-edge-end intelligence framework, is proposed in this paper. By deeply integrating GAI with 6G network design, GainNet realizes the positive closed-loop knowledge flow and sustainable-evolution GAI model optimization. On this basis, the GAI-oriented generic resource orchestration mechanism with integrated sensing, communication, and computing (GaiRom-ISCC) is proposed to guarantee the efficient operation of GainNet. Two simple case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed schemes. Finally, we envision the key challenges and future directions concerning the interplay between GAI models and 6G networks., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

Task scheduling as an effective strategy can improve application performance on computing resource-limited devices over distributed networks. However, existing evaluation mechanisms fail to depict the complexity of diverse applications, which involve dependencies among tasks, computing resource requirements, and multi-dimensional quality of service (QoS) constraints. Furthermore, traditional QoS-oriented task scheduling strategies struggle to meet the performance requirements without considering differences in satisfaction and acceptance of application, leading application failures and resource wastage. To tackle these issues, a quality of experience (QoE) cost model is designed to evaluate application completion, depicting the relationship among application satisfaction, communications, and computing resources in the distributed networks. Specifically, considering the sensitivity and preference of QoS, we model the different dimensional QoS degradation cost functions for dependent tasks, which are then integrated into the QoE cost model. Based on the QoE model, the dependent task scheduling problem is formulated as the minimization of overall QoE cost, aiming to improve the application performance in the distributed networks, which is proven Np-hard. Moreover, a heuristic Hierarchical Multi-queue Task Scheduling Algorithm (HMTSA) is proposed to address the QoE-oriented task scheduling problem among multiple dependent tasks, which utilizes hierarchical multiple queues to determine the optimal task execution order and location according to different dimensional QoS priorities. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the satisfaction of applications.

Federated learning (FL) is a classic paradigm of 6G edge intelligence (EI), which alleviates privacy leaks and high communication pressure caused by traditional centralized data processing in the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT). The implementation of multimodal federated perception (MFP) services involves three sub-processes, including sensing-based multimodal data generation, communication-based model transmission, and computing-based model training, ultimately relying on available underlying multi-domain physical resources such as time, frequency, and computing power. How to reasonably coordinate the multi-domain resources scheduling among sensing, communication, and computing, therefore, is crucial to the MFP networks. To address the above issues, this paper investigates service-oriented resource management with integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC). With the incentive mechanism of the MFP service market, the resources management problem is redefined as a social welfare maximization problem, where the idea of "expanding resources" and "reducing costs" is used to improve learning performance gain and reduce resource costs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed resource scheduling mechanisms.

Vehicular clouds (VCs) are modern platforms for processing of computation-intensive tasks over vehicles. Such tasks are often represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) consisting of interdependent vertices/subtasks and directed edges. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network-augmented deep reinforcement learning scheme (GA-DRL) for scheduling DAG tasks over dynamic VCs. In doing so, we first model the VC-assisted DAG task scheduling as a Markov decision process. We then adopt a multi-head graph attention network (GAT) to extract the features of DAG subtasks. Our developed GAT enables a two-way aggregation of the topological information in a DAG task by simultaneously considering predecessors and successors of each subtask. We further introduce non-uniform DAG neighborhood sampling through codifying the scheduling priority of different subtasks, which makes our developed GAT generalizable to completely unseen DAG task topologies. Finally, we augment GAT into a double deep Q-network learning module to conduct subtask-to-vehicle assignment according to the extracted features of subtasks, while considering the dynamics and heterogeneity of the vehicles in VCs. Through simulating various DAG tasks under real-world movement traces of vehicles, we demonstrate that GA-DRL outperforms existing benchmarks in terms of DAG task completion time., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, regular journal

Vehicular cloud (VC) platforms integrate heterogeneous and distributed resources of moving vehicles to offer timely and cost-effective computing services. However, the dynamic nature of VCs (i.e., limited contact duration among vehicles), caused by vehicles' mobility, poses unique challenges to the execution of computation-intensive applications/tasks with directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure, where each task consists of multiple interdependent components (subtasks). In this paper, we study scheduling of DAG tasks over dynamic VCs, where multiple subtasks of a DAG task are dispersed across vehicles and then processed by cooperatively utilizing vehicles' resources. We formulate DAG task scheduling as a 0-1 integer programming, aiming to minimize the overall task completion time, while ensuring a high execution success rate, which turns out to be NP-hard. To tackle the problem, we develop a ranking and foresight-integrated dynamic scheduling scheme (RFID). RFID consists of (i) a dynamic downward ranking mechanism that sorts the scheduling priority of different subtasks, while explicitly taking into account for the sequential execution nature of DAG; (ii) a resource scarcity-based priority changing mechanism that overcomes possible performance degradations caused by the volatility of VC resources; and (iii) a degree-based weighted earliest finish time mechanism that assigns the subtask with the highest scheduling priority to the vehicle which offers rapid task execution along with reliable transmission links. Our simulation results reveal the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in comparison to benchmark methods.

With the advantages of Millimeter wave in wireless communication network, the coverage radius and inter-site distance can be further reduced, the ultra dense network (UDN) becomes the mainstream of future networks. The main challenge faced by UDN is the serious inter-site interference, which needs to be carefully addressed by joint user association and resource allocation methods. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent Q-learning based method to jointly optimize the user association and resource allocation in UDN. The deep Q-network is applied to guarantee the convergence of the proposed method. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method and different performances under different simulation parameters are evaluated., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

Graph jobs represent a wide variety of computation-intensive tasks in which computations are represented by graphs consisting of components (denoting either data sources or data processing) and edges (corresponding to data flows between the components). Recent years have witnessed dramatic growth in smart vehicles and computation-intensive graph jobs, which pose new challenges to the provision of efficient services related to the Internet of Vehicles. Fortunately, vehicular clouds formed by a collection of vehicles, which allows jobs to be offloaded among vehicles, can substantially alleviate heavy on-board workloads and enable on-demand provisioning of computational resources. In this paper, we present a novel framework for vehicular clouds that maps components of graph jobs to service providers via opportunistic vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Then, graph job allocation over vehicular clouds is formulated as a non-linear integer programming with respect to vehicles' contact duration and available resources, aiming to minimize job completion time and data exchange cost. The problem is addressed for two scenarios: low-traffic and rush-hours. For the former, we determine the optimal solutions for the problem. In the latter case, given the intractable computations for deriving feasible allocations, we propose a novel low complexity randomized graph job allocation mechanism by considering hierarchical tree based subgraph isomorphism. We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms through extensive simulations., Comment: 11 pages, 6 Figures