A Cloud-Fog Enabled and Privacy-Preserving IoT Data Market Platform Based on Blockchain

The dynamic landscape of the Internet of Things(IoT)is set to revolutionize the pace of interaction among entities,ushering in a proliferation of applications characterized by heightened quality and diversity.Among the pivotal applications within the realm of IoT,as a significant example,the Smart Grid(SG)evolves into intricate networks of energy deployment marked by data integration.This evolution concurrently entails data interchange with other IoT entities.However,there are also several challenges including data-sharing overheads and the intricate establishment of trusted centers in the IoT ecosystem.In this paper,we introduce a hierarchical secure data-sharing platform empowered by cloud-fog integration.Furthermore,we propose a novel non-interactive zero-knowledge proof-based group authentication and key agreement protocol that supports one-to-many sharing sets of IoT data,especially SG data.The security formal verification tool shows that the proposed scheme can achieve mutual authentication and secure data sharing while protecting the privacy of data providers.Compared with previous IoT data sharing schemes,the proposed scheme has advantages in both computational and transmission efficiency,and has more superiority with the increasing volume of shared data or increasing number of participants.

A survey on blockchain-enabled federated learning and its prospects with digital twin

Digital Twin(DT)supports real time analysis and provides a reliable simulation platform in the Internet of Things(IoT).The creation and application of DT hinges on amounts of data,which poses pressure on the application of Artificial Intelligence(AI)for DT descriptions and intelligent decision-making.Federated Learning(FL)is a cutting-edge technology that enables geographically dispersed devices to collaboratively train a shared global model locally rather than relying on a data center to perform model training.Therefore,DT can benefit by combining with FL,successfully solving the"data island"problem in traditional AI.However,FL still faces serious challenges,such as enduring single-point failures,suffering from poison attacks,lacking effective incentive mechanisms.Before the successful deployment of DT,we should tackle the issues caused by FL.Researchers from industry and academia have recognized the potential of introducing Blockchain Technology(BT)into FL to overcome the challenges faced by FL,where BT acting as a distributed and immutable ledger,can store data in a secure,traceable,and trusted manner.However,to the best of our knowledge,a comprehensive literature review on this topic is still missing.In this paper,we review existing works about blockchain-enabled FL and visualize their prospects with DT.To this end,we first propose evaluation requirements with respect to security,faulttolerance,fairness,efficiency,cost-saving,profitability,and support for heterogeneity.Then,we classify existing literature according to the functionalities of BT in FL and analyze their advantages and disadvantages based on the proposed evaluation requirements.Finally,we discuss open problems in the existing literature and the future of DT supported by blockchain-enabled FL,based on which we further propose some directions for future research.

Physical Layer Security Performance Analysis in Multi-Antenna NOMA-Based UAV Relay Networks

With the increasing number of communication devices and the complexity of communication environments,unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV),due to their flexible deployment and convenient networking capabilities,have shown significant advantages in tasks such as high-density communication areas and emergency rescue within special communication scenarios.Considering the openness of air-toground wireless communication,it is more susceptible to eavesdropping attacks.As a result,the introduction of physical layer security(PLS)in UAV communication systems is crucial to safeguard the security of transmitted data.In this paper,we investigate the PLS issues in a UAV cooperative communication system operating in Nakagami-m fading channels with the presence of friendly interference.It considers the effects of imperfect successive interference cancellation(i SIC)and power allocation coefficients on system performance based on non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA)techniques.By deriving closed-form expressions for the outage probabilities at the receiving users and the intercept probability of UAV eavesdropper(U-EAV),the performance of the considered cooperative UAV-assisted NOMA relay system with the presence of friendly interference is evaluated.

Joint alignment and steering to manage interference

In wireless communication networks,mobile users in overlapping areas may experience severe interference,therefore,designing effective Interference Management(IM)methods is crucial to improving network performance.However,when managing multiple disturbances from the same source,it may not be feasible to use existing IM methods such as Interference Alignment(IA)and Interference Steering(IS)exclusively.It is because with IA,the aligned interference becomes indistinguishable at its desired Receiver(Rx)under the cost constraint of Degrees-of-Freedom(DoF),while with IS,more transmit power will be consumed in the direct and repeated application of IS to each interference.To remedy these deficiencies,Interference Alignment Steering(IAS)is proposed by incorporating IA and IS and exploiting their advantages in IM.With IAS,the interfering Transmitter(Tx)first aligns one interference incurred by the transmission of one data stream to a one-dimensional subspace orthogonal to the desired transmission at the interfered Rx,and then the remaining interferences are treated as a whole and steered to the same subspace as the aligned interference.Moreover,two improved versions of IAS,i.e.,IAS with Full Adjustment at the Interfering Tx(IAS-FAIT)and Interference Steering and Alignment(ISA),are presented.The former considers the influence of IA on the interfering user-pair's performance.The orthogonality between the desired signals at the interfered Rx can be maintained by adjusting the spatial characteristics of all interferences and the aligned interference components,thus ensuring the Spectral Efficiency(SE)of the interfering communication pairs.Under ISA,the power cost for IS at the interfered Tx is minimized,hence improving SE performance of the interfered communication-pairs.Since the proposed methods are realized at the interfering and interfered Txs cooperatively,the expenses of IM are shared by both communication-pairs.Our in-depth simulation results show that joint use of IA and IS can effectively manage multiple disturbances from the same source and improve the system's SE.

CRBFT:A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus Protocol Based on Collaborative Filtering Recommendation for Blockchains

Blockchain has been widely used in finance,the Internet of Things(IoT),supply chains,and other scenarios as a revolutionary technology.Consensus protocol plays a vital role in blockchain,which helps all participants to maintain the storage state consistently.However,with the improvement of network environment complexity and system scale,blockchain development is limited by the performance,security,and scalability of the consensus protocol.To address this problem,this paper introduces the collaborative filtering mechanism commonly used in the recommendation system into the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance(PBFT)and proposes a Byzantine fault-tolerant(BFT)consensus protocol based on collaborative filtering recommendation(CRBFT).Specifically,an improved collaborative filtering recommendation method is designed to use the similarity between a node’s recommendation opinions and those of the recommender as a basis for determining whether to adopt the recommendation opinions.This can amplify the recommendation voice of good nodes,weaken the impact of cunningmalicious nodes on the trust value calculation,andmake the calculated resultsmore accurate.In addition,the nodes are given voting power according to their trust value,and a weight randomelection algorithm is designed and implemented to reduce the risk of attack.The experimental results show that CRBFT can effectively eliminate various malicious nodes and improve the performance of blockchain systems in complex network environments,and the feasibility of CRBFT is also proven by theoretical analysis.

A Deep Learning Based Broadcast Approach for Image Semantic Communication over Fading Channels

We consider an image semantic communication system in a time-varying fading Gaussian MIMO channel,with a finite number of channel states.A deep learning-aided broadcast approach scheme is proposed to benefit the adaptive semantic transmission in terms of different channel states.We combine the classic broadcast approach with the image transformer to implement this adaptive joint source and channel coding(JSCC)scheme.Specifically,we utilize the neural network(NN)to jointly optimize the hierarchical image compression and superposition code mapping within this scheme.The learned transformers and codebooks allow recovering of the image with an adaptive quality and low error rate at the receiver side,in each channel state.The simulation results exhibit our proposed scheme can dynamically adapt the coding to the current channel state and outperform some existing intelligent schemes with the fixed coding block.

Belief Combination of Classifiers for Incomplete Data

Data with missing values,or incomplete information,brings some challenges to the development of classification,as the incompleteness may significantly affect the performance of classifiers.In this paper,we handle missing values in both training and test sets with uncertainty and imprecision reasoning by proposing a new belief combination of classifier(BCC)method based on the evidence theory.The proposed BCC method aims to improve the classification performance of incomplete data by characterizing the uncertainty and imprecision brought by incompleteness.In BCC,different attributes are regarded as independent sources,and the collection of each attribute is considered as a subset.Then,multiple classifiers are trained with each subset independently and allow each observed attribute to provide a sub-classification result for the query pattern.Finally,these sub-classification results with different weights(discounting factors)are used to provide supplementary information to jointly determine the final classes of query patterns.The weights consist of two aspects:global and local.The global weight calculated by an optimization function is employed to represent the reliability of each classifier,and the local weight obtained by mining attribute distribution characteristics is used to quantify the importance of observed attributes to the pattern classification.Abundant comparative experiments including seven methods on twelve datasets are executed,demonstrating the out-performance of BCC over all baseline methods in terms of accuracy,precision,recall,F1 measure,with pertinent computational costs.

MEASUREMENTS AND APPLICATIONS OF QoE FOR MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS

With the rapid development of smart devices and mobile networks,multimedia services will dominate most of data traffic in 4G/5G networks.Applications -such as conversational videos,online multimedia sharing,remote education,etc.have gained their popularity and will become more ubiquitous among customers.Tra-

Credible Routing Scheme of SDN-Based Cloud Using Blockchain

Software-defined networks (SDN) have been widely used in Cloud Data Centers in recent years. With the development of cloud technologies, different organizations need to share network resources to achieve common business goals, which requires distributed SDN controllers to collaboratively manage cloud networks and realize cross-domain routing. However, existing distributed controller cooperative routing schemes require a third-party trust center to establish trusted relationships for controllers. Since both trust centers and certified entities are vulnerable to various attacks and security risks, the existing works cannot effectively ensure cross-domain routing is credible. To address this problem, Blockchain is employed to establish trusted relationships between distributed controllers, then a cross-domain routing mechanism was devised based on the trusted relationships. Security analysis and experiments indicate that the proposed scheme can establish trust relationships and provide credible cross-domain routing cooperation for distributed SDN controllers. Besides, the required overhead of storage and bandwidth are very limited, which implies good practicability.

A dynamic incentive and reputation mechanism for energy-efficient federated learning in 6G

As 5G becomes commercial,researchers have turned attention toward the Sixth-Generation(6G)network with the vision of connecting intelligence in a green energy-efficient manner.Federated learning triggers an upsurge of green intelligent services such as resources orchestration of communication infrastructures while preserving privacy and increasing communication efficiency.However,designing effective incentives in federated learning is challenging due to the dynamic available clients and the correlation between clients'contributions during the learning process.In this paper,we propose a dynamic incentive and reputation mechanism to improve energy efficiency and training performance of federated learning.The proposed incentive based on the Stackelberg game can timely adjust optimal energy consumption with changes in available clients during federated learning.Meanwhile,clients’contributions in reputation management are formulated based on the cooperative game to capture the correlation between tasks,which satisfies availability,fairness,and additivity.The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly motivate high-performance clients to participate in federated learning and improve the accuracy and energy efficiency of the federated learning model.

SCIM: Incorporating secure communication and interference management in one operation

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications,users’data transmitted wirelessly is susceptible to security/privacy threats.Meanwhile,as a result of the limitation of spectrum resources,massive wireless connections will incur serious interference,which may damage the efficiency of data transmission.Therefore,improving both efficiency and secrecy of data transmission is of research significance.In this paper,we propose a wireless transmission scheme by taking both Secure Communication(SC)and Interference Management(IM)into account,namely SCIM.With this scheme,an SCIM signal is generated by the legitimate transmitter(Tx)and sent along with the desired signal,so that the SCIM signal can interact with and suppress the environmental interference at the legitimate receiver(Rx).Meanwhile,the SCIM signal may interfere with the eavesdropper in the coverage of legitimate transmission so as to deteriorate the eavesdropping performance.Therefore,the secrecy of desired transmission is improved.In this way,both the transmission efficiency and privacy are enhanced.Then,by taking various transmission preferences into account,we develop different implementations of SCIM,including Interference Suppression First SCIM(ISF-SCIM),Data Transmission First SCIM(DTF-SCIM),Anti-Eavesdropping First SCIM(AEF-SCIM),and Secrecy Rate Maximization SCIM(SRM-SCIM).Our in-depth simulation results have shown the proposed methods to effectively improve the efficiency and secrecy of the legitimate transmission.

A lightweight hardware implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber

The security of cryptographic algorithms based on integer factorization and discrete logarithm will be threatened by quantum computers in future.Since December 2016,the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST)has begun to solicit post-quantum cryptographic(PQC)algorithms worldwide.CRYSTALS-Kyber was selected as the standard of PQC algorithm after 3 rounds of evaluation.Meanwhile considering the large resource consumption of current implementation,this paper presents a lightweight architecture for ASICs and its implementation on FPGAs for prototyping.In this implementation,a novel compact modular multiplication unit(MMU)and compression/decompression module is proposed to save hardware resources.We put forward a specially optimized schoolbook polynomial multiplication(SPM)instead of number theoretic transform(NTT)core for polynomial multiplication,which can reduce about 74%SLICE cost.We also use signed number representation to save memory resources.In addition,we optimize the hardware implementation of the Hash module,which cuts off about 48%of FF consumption by register reuse technology.Our design can be implemented on Kintex-7(XC7K325T-2FFG900I)FPGA for prototyping,which occupations of 4777/4993 LUTs,2661/2765 FFs,1395/1452 SLICEs,2.5/2.5 BRAMs,and 0/0 DSP respective of client/server side.The maximum clock frequency can reach at 244 MHz.As far as we know,our design consumes the least resources compared with other existing designs,which is very friendly to resource-constrained devices.

Frontiers of collaborative intelligence systems

The development of information technology has propelled technological reform in artificial intelligence(AI).To address the needs of diversified and complex applications,AI has been increasingly trending towards intelligent,collaborative,and systematized development across different levels and tasks.Research on intelligent,collaborative and systematized AI can be divided into three levels:micro,meso,and macro.Firstly,the micro-level collaboration is illustrated through the introduction of swarm intelligence collaborative methods related to individuals collaboration and decision variables collaboration.Secondly,the meso-level collaboration is discussed in terms of multi-task collaboration and multi-party collaboration.Thirdly,the macro-level collaboration is primarily in the context of intelligent collaborative systems,such as terrestrial-satellite collaboration,space-air-ground collaboration,space-air-ground-air collaboration,vehicle-road-cloud collaboration and end-edge-cloud collaboration.Finally,this paper provides prospects on the future development of relevant fields from the perspectives of the micro,meso,and macro levels.

Privacy Computing: Concept, Computing Framework, and Future Development Trends

With the rapid development of information technology and the continuous evolution of personalized ser- vices, huge amounts of data are accumulated by large internet companies in the process of serving users. Moreover, dynamic data interactions increase the intentional/unintentional persistence of private infor- mation in different information systems. However, problems such as the cask principle of preserving pri- vate information among different information systems and the dif culty of tracing the source of privacy violations are becoming increasingly serious. Therefore, existing privacy-preserving schemes cannot pro- vide systematic privacy preservation. In this paper, we examine the links of the information life-cycle, such as information collection, storage, processing, distribution, and destruction. We then propose a the- ory of privacy computing and a key technology system that includes a privacy computing framework, a formal de nition of privacy computing, four principles that should be followed in privacy computing, ffect algorithm design criteria, evaluation of the privacy-preserving effect, and a privacy computing language. Finally, we employ four application scenarios to describe the universal application of privacy computing, and discuss the prospect of future research trends. This work is expected to guide theoretical research on user privacy preservation within open environments.

Edge Caching in Blockchain Empowered 6G

The sixth generation(6G)of wireless cellular networks is expected to incorporate the latest developments in network infrastructure and emerging advances in technology.In the age of 6G,edge caching technology will evolve towards intelligence,dynamics,and security.However,the security problems of edge caching,including data tampering and eavesdropping,are seldomly considered in most literatures.In this paper,we consider the two-hop edge caching where the blockchain and physical layer security technologies are adopted to prevent data from being tampered with and eavesdropped.We design blockchain-based framework to guarantee the reliability of important data such as the frequency of contents and jointly optimize content caching probability and redundancy rate to maximize the secure transmission probability.Extensive simulation shows that our optimization scheme can significantly improve the secure transmission probability of edge cache network,whether facing the threat of independent eavesdropping or joint eavesdropping.

RTRC:A Reputation-Based Incentive Game Model for Trustworthy Crowdsourcing Service

The ubiquity of mobile devices have promoted the prosperity of mobile crowd systems, which recruit crowds to contribute their resources for performing tasks. Yet, due to the various resource consumption, the crowds may be reluctant to join and contribute information. Thus, the low participation level of crowds will be a hurdle that prevents the adoption of crowdsourcing. A critical challenge for these systems is how to design a proper mechanism such that the crowds spontaneously act as suppliers to contribute accurate information. Most of existing mechanisms ignore either the honesty of crowds or requesters respectively. In this paper, considering the honesty of both, we propose a game-based incentive mechanism, namely RTRC, to stimulate the crowds to contribute accurate information and to motivate the requesters to return accurate feedbacks. In addition, an evolutionary game is designed to model the dynamic of user-strategy selection. Specially, the replicator dynamic is applied to model the adaptation of strategy interactions taking into account the dynamic nature in time dependence and we also derive the evolutionarily stable strategies(ESSs) for users. Finally, empirical results over the simulations show that all the requesters and suppliers will select honest strategy to maximize their profit.

Distributed Information Flow Verification for Secure Service Composition in Smart Sensor Network

Accelerate processor, efficient software and pervasive connections provide sensor nodes with more powerful computation and storage ability, which can offer various services to user. Based on these atomic services, different sensor nodes can cooperate and compose with each other to complete more complicated tasks for user. However, because of the regional characteristic of sensor nodes, merging data with different sensitivities become a primary requirement to the composite services, and information flow security should be intensively considered during service composition. In order to mitigate the great cost caused by the complexity of modeling and the heavy load of single-node verification to the energy-limited sensor node, in this paper, we propose a new distributed verification framework to enforce information flow security on composite services of smart sensor network. We analyze the information flows in composite services and specify security constraints for each service participant. Then we propose an algorithm over the distributed verification framework involving each sensor node to participate in the composite service verification based on the security constraints. The experimental results indicate that our approach can reduce the cost of verification and provide a better load balance.

Blockchain-based data transmission control for Tactical Data Link

Tactical Data Link(TDL)is a communication system that utilizes a particular message format and a protocol to transmit data via wireless channels in an instant,automatic,and secure way.So far,TDL has shown its excellence in military applications.Current TDL adopts a distributed architecture to enhance anti-destruction capacity.However,It still faces a problem of data inconsistency and thus cannot well support cooperation across multiple militarily domains.To tackle this problem,we propose to leverage blockchain to build an automatic and adaptive data transmission control scheme for TDL.It achieves automatic data transmission and realizes information consistency among different TDL entities.Besides,applying smart contracts based on blockchain further enables adjusting data transmission policies automatically.Security analysis and experimental results based on simulations illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Privacy preservation in permissionless blockchain:A survey

Permissionless blockchain,as a kind of distributed ledger,has gained considerable attention because of its openness,transparency,decentralization,and immutability.Currently,permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields,from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things(IoT)and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking(VANET),which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure.However,blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications.Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain,they failed to reveal the latest advances,nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain.Therefore,in this paper,we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain,summarize the potential privacy threats,and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain.Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria.We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.

An Efficient Correlation-Aware Anomaly Detection Framework in Cellular Network

Nowadays,the fifth-generation(5G)mobile communication system has obtained prosperous development and deployment,reshaping our daily lives.However,anomalies of cell outages and congestion in 5G critically influence the quality of experience and significantly increase operational expenditures.Although several big data and artificial intelligencebased anomaly detection methods have been proposed for wireless cellular systems,they change distributions of the data and ignore the relevance among user activities,causing anomaly detection ineffective for some cells.In this paper,we propose a highly effective and accurate anomaly detection framework by utilizing generative adversarial networks(GAN)and long short-term memory(LSTM)neural networks.The framework expands the original dataset while simultaneously keeping the distribution of data unchanged,and explores the relevance among user activities to further improve the system performance.The results demonstrate that our framework can achieve 97.16%accuracy and 2.30%false positive rate by utilizing the correlation of user activities and data expansion.