Air-Ground Collaborative Mobile Edge Computing:Architecture,Challenges,and Opportunities

By pushing computation,cache,and network control to the edge,mobile edge computing(MEC)is expected to play a leading role in fifth generation(5G)and future sixth generation(6G).Nevertheless,facing ubiquitous fast-growing computational demands,it is impossible for a single MEC paradigm to effectively support high-quality intelligent services at end user equipments(UEs).To address this issue,we propose an air-ground collaborative MEC(AGCMEC)architecture in this article.The proposed AGCMEC integrates all potentially available MEC servers within air and ground in the envisioned 6G,by a variety of collaborative ways to provide computation services at their best for UEs.Firstly,we introduce the AGC-MEC architecture and elaborate three typical use cases.Then,we discuss four main challenges in the AGC-MEC as well as their potential solutions.Next,we conduct a case study of collaborative service placement for AGC-MEC to validate the effectiveness of the proposed collaborative service placement strategy.Finally,we highlight several potential research directions of the AGC-MEC.

Leveraging User-Generated Comments and Fused BiLSTM Models to Detect and Predict Issues with Mobile Apps

In the last decade, technical advancements and faster Internet speeds have also led to an increasing number ofmobile devices and users. Thus, all contributors to society, whether young or old members, can use these mobileapps. The use of these apps eases our daily lives, and all customers who need any type of service can accessit easily, comfortably, and efficiently through mobile apps. Particularly, Saudi Arabia greatly depends on digitalservices to assist people and visitors. Such mobile devices are used in organizing daily work schedules and services,particularly during two large occasions, Umrah and Hajj. However, pilgrims encounter mobile app issues such asslowness, conflict, unreliability, or user-unfriendliness. Pilgrims comment on these issues on mobile app platformsthrough reviews of their experiences with these digital services. Scholars have made several attempts to solve suchmobile issues by reporting bugs or non-functional requirements by utilizing user comments.However, solving suchissues is a great challenge, and the issues still exist. Therefore, this study aims to propose a hybrid deep learningmodel to classify and predict mobile app software issues encountered by millions of pilgrims during the Hajj andUmrah periods from the user perspective. Firstly, a dataset was constructed using user-generated comments fromrelevant mobile apps using natural language processing methods, including information extraction, the annotationprocess, and pre-processing steps, considering a multi-class classification problem. Then, several experimentswere conducted using common machine learning classifiers, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Long Short-TermMemory (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) architectures, toexamine the performance of the proposed model. Results show 96% in F1-score and accuracy, and the proposedmodel outperformed the mentioned models.

Attention-relation network for mobile phone screen defect classification via a few samples

How to use a few defect samples to complete the defect classification is a key challenge in the production of mobile phone screens.An attention-relation network for the mobile phone screen defect classification is proposed in this paper.The architecture of the attention-relation network contains two modules:a feature extract module and a feature metric module.Different from other few-shot models,an attention mechanism is applied to metric learning in our model to measure the distance between features,so as to pay attention to the correlation between features and suppress unwanted information.Besides,we combine dilated convolution and skip connection to extract more feature information for follow-up processing.We validate attention-relation network on the mobile phone screen defect dataset.The experimental results show that the classification accuracy of the attentionrelation network is 0.9486 under the 5-way 1-shot training strategy and 0.9039 under the 5-way 5-shot setting.It achieves the excellent effect of classification for mobile phone screen defects and outperforms with dominant advantages.

Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control for Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robots:A Barrier Function Sliding Mode Approach

The trajectory tracking control performance of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots(NWMRs)is subject to nonholonomic constraints,system uncertainties,and external disturbances.This paper proposes a barrier function-based adaptive sliding mode control(BFASMC)method to provide high-precision,fast-response performance and robustness for NWMRs.Compared with the conventional adaptive sliding mode control,the proposed control strategy can guarantee that the sliding mode variables converge to a predefined neighborhood of origin with a predefined reaching time independent of the prior knowledge of the uncertainties and disturbances bounds.Another advantage of the proposed algorithm is that the control gains can be adaptively adjusted to follow the disturbances amplitudes thanks to the barrier function.The benefit is that the overestimation of control gain can be eliminated,resulting in chattering reduction.Moreover,a modified barrier function-like control gain is employed to prevent the input saturation problem due to the physical limit of the actuator.The stability analysis and comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed BFASMC can ensure the prespecified convergence performance of the NWMR system output variables and strong robustness against uncertainties/disturbances.

IRS Assisted UAV Communications against Proactive Eavesdropping in Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper,we consider mobile edge computing(MEC)networks against proactive eavesdropping.To maximize the transmission rate,IRS assisted UAV communications are applied.We take the joint design of the trajectory of UAV,the transmitting beamforming of users,and the phase shift matrix of IRS.The original problem is strong non-convex and difficult to solve.We first propose two basic modes of the proactive eavesdropper,and obtain the closed-form solution for the boundary conditions of the two modes.Then we transform the original problem into an equivalent one and propose an alternating optimization(AO)based method to obtain a local optimal solution.The convergence of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical results.Further,we propose a zero forcing(ZF)based method as sub-optimal solution,and the simulation section shows that the proposed two schemes could obtain better performance compared with traditional schemes.

Time Parameter Based Low-Energy Data Encryption Method for Mobile Applications

Various mobile devices and applications are now used in daily life.These devices require high-speed data processing,low energy consumption,low communication latency,and secure data transmission,especially in 5G and 6G mobile networks.High-security cryptography guarantees that essential data can be transmitted securely;however,it increases energy consumption and reduces data processing speed.Therefore,this study proposes a low-energy data encryption(LEDE)algorithm based on the Advanced Encryption Standard(AES)for improving data transmission security and reducing the energy consumption of encryption in Internet-of-Things(IoT)devices.In the proposed LEDE algorithm,the system time parameter is employed to create a dynamic S-Box to replace the static S-Box of AES.Tests indicated that six-round LEDE encryption achieves the same security level as 10-round conventional AES encryption.This reduction in encryption time results in the LEDE algorithm having a 67.4%lower energy consumption and 43.9%shorter encryption time than conventional AES;thus,the proposed LEDE algorithm can improve the performance and the energy consumption of IoT edge devices.

Observer-based dynamic event-triggered control for distributed parameter systems over mobile sensor-plus-actuator networks

We develop a policy of observer-based dynamic event-triggered state feedback control for distributed parameter systems over a mobile sensor-plus-actuator network.It is assumed that the mobile sensing devices that provide spatially averaged state measurements can be used to improve state estimation in the network.For the purpose of decreasing the update frequency of controller and unnecessary sampled data transmission, an efficient dynamic event-triggered control policy is constructed.In an event-triggered system, when an error signal exceeds a specified time-varying threshold, it indicates the occurrence of a typical event.The global asymptotic stability of the event-triggered closed-loop system and the boundedness of the minimum inter-event time can be guaranteed.Based on the linear quadratic optimal regulator, the actuator selects the optimal displacement only when an event occurs.A simulation example is finally used to verify that the effectiveness of such a control strategy can enhance the system performance.

Privacy Enhanced Mobile User Authentication Method Using Motion Sensors

With the development of hardware devices and the upgrading of smartphones,a large number of users save privacy-related information in mobile devices,mainly smartphones,which puts forward higher demands on the protection of mobile users’privacy information.At present,mobile user authenticationmethods based on humancomputer interaction have been extensively studied due to their advantages of high precision and non-perception,but there are still shortcomings such as low data collection efficiency,untrustworthy participating nodes,and lack of practicability.To this end,this paper proposes a privacy-enhanced mobile user authentication method with motion sensors,which mainly includes:(1)Construct a smart contract-based private chain and federated learning to improve the data collection efficiency of mobile user authentication,reduce the probability of the model being bypassed by attackers,and reduce the overhead of data centralized processing and the risk of privacy leakage;(2)Use certificateless encryption to realize the authentication of the device to ensure the credibility of the client nodes participating in the calculation;(3)Combine Variational Mode Decomposition(VMD)and Long Short-TermMemory(LSTM)to analyze and model the motion sensor data of mobile devices to improve the accuracy of model certification.The experimental results on the real environment dataset of 1513 people show that themethod proposed in this paper can effectively resist poisoning attacks while ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of mobile user authentication.

Heuristic Expanding Disconnected Graph:A Rapid Path Planning Method for Mobile Robots

Existing mobile robots mostly use graph search algorithms for path planning,which suffer from relatively low planning efficiency owing to high redundancy and large computational complexity.Due to the limitations of the neighborhood search strategy,the robots could hardly obtain the most optimal global path.A global path planning algorithm,denoted as EDG*,is proposed by expanding nodes using a well-designed expanding disconnected graph operator(EDG)in this paper.Firstly,all obstacles are marked and their corners are located through the map pre-processing.Then,the EDG operator is designed to find points in non-obstruction areas to complete the rapid expansion of disconnected nodes.Finally,the EDG*heuristic iterative algorithm is proposed.It selects the candidate node through a specific valuation function and realizes the node expansion while avoiding collision with a minimum offset.Path planning experiments were conducted in a typical indoor environment and on the public dataset CSM.The result shows that the proposed EDG*reduced the planning time by more than 90%and total length of paths reduced by more than 4.6%.Compared to A*,Dijkstra and JPS,EDG*does not show an exponential explosion effect in map size.The EDG*showed better performance in terms of path smoothness,and collision avoidance.This shows that the EDG*algorithm proposed in this paper can improve the efficiency of path planning and enhance path quality.

Trust-based co-operative routing for secure communication in mobile ad hoc networks

The working of a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork(MANET)relies on the supportive cooperation among the network nodes.But due to its intrinsic features,a misbehaving node can easily lead to a routing disorder.This paper presents two trust-based routing schemes,namely Trust-based Self-Detection Routing(TSDR)and Trust-based Cooperative Routing(TCOR)designed with an Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector(AODV)protocol.The proposed work covers a wide range of security challenges,including malicious node identification and prevention,accurate trust quantification,secure trust data sharing,and trusted route maintenance.This brings a prominent solution for mitigating misbehaving nodes and establishing efficient communication in MANET.It is empirically validated based on a performance comparison with the current Evolutionary Self-Cooperative Trust(ESCT)scheme,Generalized Trust Model(GTM),and the conventional AODV protocol.The extensive simulations are conducted against three different varying network scenarios.The results affirm the improved values of eight popular performance metrics overcoming the existing routing schemes.Among the two proposed works,TCOR is more suitable for highly scalable networks;TSDR suits,however,the MANET application better with its small size.This work thus makes a significant contribution to the research community,in contrast to many previous works focusing solely on specific security aspects,and results in a trade-off in the expected values of evaluation parameters and asserts their efficiency.

Mechanism analysis of regulating Turing instability and Hopf bifurcation of malware propagation in mobile wireless sensor networks

A dynamical model is constructed to depict the spatial-temporal evolution of malware in mobile wireless sensor networks(MWSNs). Based on such a model, we design a hybrid control scheme combining parameter perturbation and state feedback to effectively manipulate the spatiotemporal dynamics of malware propagation. The hybrid control can not only suppress the Turing instability caused by diffusion factor but can also adjust the occurrence of Hopf bifurcation induced by time delay. Numerical simulation results show that the hybrid control strategy can efficiently manipulate the transmission dynamics to achieve our expected desired properties, thus reducing the harm of malware propagation to MWSNs.

Mobile Crowdsourcing Task Allocation Based on Dynamic Self-Attention GANs

Crowdsourcing technology is widely recognized for its effectiveness in task scheduling and resource allocation.While traditional methods for task allocation can help reduce costs and improve efficiency,they may encounter challenges when dealing with abnormal data flow nodes,leading to decreased allocation accuracy and efficiency.To address these issues,this study proposes a novel two-part invalid detection task allocation framework.In the first step,an anomaly detection model is developed using a dynamic self-attentive GAN to identify anomalous data.Compared to the baseline method,the model achieves an approximately 4%increase in the F1 value on the public dataset.In the second step of the framework,task allocation modeling is performed using a twopart graph matching method.This phase introduces a P-queue KM algorithm that implements a more efficient optimization strategy.The allocation efficiency is improved by approximately 23.83%compared to the baseline method.Empirical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in detecting abnormal data nodes,enhancing allocation precision,and achieving efficient allocation.

Energy Minimization for Heterogenous Traffic Coexistence with Puncturing in Mobile Edge Computing-Based Industrial Internet of Things

Puncturing has been recognized as a promising technology to cope with the coexistence problem of enhanced mobile broadband(eMBB) and ultra-reliable low latency communications(URLLC)traffic. However, the steady performance of eMBB traffic while meeting the requirements of URLLC traffic with puncturing is a major challenge in some realistic scenarios. In this paper, we pay attention to the timely and energy-efficient processing for eMBB traffic in the industrial Internet of Things(IIoT), where mobile edge computing(MEC) is employed for data processing. Specifically, the performance of eMBB traffic and URLLC traffic in a MEC-based IIoT system is ensured by setting the threshold of tolerable delay and outage probability, respectively. Furthermore,considering the limited energy supply, an energy minimization problem of eMBB device is formulated under the above constraints, by jointly optimizing the resource blocks(RBs) punctured by URLLC traffic, data offloading and transmit power of eMBB device. With Markov's inequality, the problem is reformulated by transforming the probabilistic outage constraint into a deterministic constraint. Meanwhile, an iterative energy minimization algorithm(IEMA) is proposed.Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm has a significant reduction in the energy consumption for eMBB device and achieves a better overall effect compared to several benchmarks.

Mobile genetic elements facilitate the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes in multidrug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae from duck farms

Multidrug-resistant(MDR)Enterobacteriaceae critically threaten duck farming and public health.The phenotypes,genotypes,and associated mobile genetic elements(MGEs)of MDR Enterobacteriaceae isolated from 6 duck farms in Zhejiang Province,China,were investigated.A total of 215 isolates were identified as Escherichia coli(64.65%),Klebsiella pneumoniae(12.09%),Proteus mirabilis(10.23%),Salmonella(8.84%),and Enterobacter cloacae(4.19%).Meanwhile,all isolates were resistant to at least two antibiotics.Most isolates carried tet(A)(85.12%),blaTEM(78.60%)and sul1(67.44%)resistance genes.Gene co-occurrence analysis showed that the resistance genes were associated with IS26 and integrons.A conjugative IncFII plasmid pSDM004 containing all the above MGEs was detected in Proteus mirabilis isolate SDM004.This isolate was resistant to 18 antibiotics and carried the blaNDM-5 gene.MGEs,especially plasmids,are the primary antibiotic resistance gene transmission route in duck farms.These findings provide a theoretical basis for the rational use of antibiotics in farms which are substantial for evaluating public health and food safety.

Deep Transfer Learning Models for Mobile-Based Ocular Disorder Identification on Retinal Images

Mobile technology is developing significantly.Mobile phone technologies have been integrated into the healthcare industry to help medical practitioners.Typically,computer vision models focus on image detection and classification issues.MobileNetV2 is a computer vision model that performs well on mobile devices,but it requires cloud services to process biometric image information and provide predictions to users.This leads to increased latency.Processing biometrics image datasets on mobile devices will make the prediction faster,but mobiles are resource-restricted devices in terms of storage,power,and computational speed.Hence,a model that is small in size,efficient,and has good prediction quality for biometrics image classification problems is required.Quantizing pre-trained CNN(PCNN)MobileNetV2 architecture combined with a Support Vector Machine(SVM)compacts the model representation and reduces the computational cost and memory requirement.This proposed novel approach combines quantized pre-trained CNN(PCNN)MobileNetV2 architecture with a Support Vector Machine(SVM)to represent models efficiently with low computational cost and memory.Our contributions include evaluating three CNN models for ocular disease identification in transfer learning and deep feature plus SVM approaches,showing the superiority of deep features from MobileNetV2 and SVM classification models,comparing traditional methods,exploring six ocular diseases and normal classification with 20,111 images postdata augmentation,and reducing the number of trainable models.The model is trained on ocular disorder retinal fundus image datasets according to the severity of six age-related macular degeneration(AMD),one of the most common eye illnesses,Cataract,Diabetes,Glaucoma,Hypertension,andMyopia with one class Normal.From the experiment outcomes,it is observed that the suggested MobileNetV2-SVM model size is compressed.The testing accuracy for MobileNetV2-SVM,InceptionV3,and MobileNetV2 is 90.11%,86.88%,and 89.76%respectively while MobileNetV2-SVM,InceptionV3,and MobileNetV2 accuracy are observed to be 92.59%,83.38%,and 90.16%,respectively.The proposed novel technique can be used to classify all biometric medical image datasets on mobile devices.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading and Service Migrating Policies in Service Caching-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Emerging mobile edge computing(MEC)is considered a feasible solution for offloading the computation-intensive request tasks generated from mobile wireless equipment(MWE)with limited computational resources and energy.Due to the homogeneity of request tasks from one MWE during a longterm time period,it is vital to predeploy the particular service cachings required by the request tasks at the MEC server.In this paper,we model a service caching-assisted MEC framework that takes into account the constraint on the number of service cachings hosted by each edge server and the migration of request tasks from the current edge server to another edge server with service caching required by tasks.Furthermore,we propose a multiagent deep reinforcement learning-based computation offloading and task migrating decision-making scheme(MBOMS)to minimize the long-term average weighted cost.The proposed MBOMS can learn the near-optimal offloading and migrating decision-making policy by centralized training and decentralized execution.Systematic and comprehensive simulation results reveal that our proposed MBOMS can converge well after training and outperforms the other five baseline algorithms.

Secure Computation Efficiency Resource Allocation for Massive MIMO-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this article,the secure computation efficiency(SCE)problem is studied in a massive multipleinput multiple-output(mMIMO)-assisted mobile edge computing(MEC)network.We first derive the secure transmission rate based on the mMIMO under imperfect channel state information.Based on this,the SCE maximization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the local computation frequency,the offloading time,the downloading time,the users and the base station transmit power.Due to its difficulty to directly solve the formulated problem,we first transform the fractional objective function into the subtractive form one via the dinkelbach method.Next,the original problem is transformed into a convex one by applying the successive convex approximation technique,and an iteration algorithm is proposed to obtain the solutions.Finally,the stimulations are conducted to show that the performance of the proposed schemes is superior to that of the other schemes.

Achieving dynamic privacy measurement and protection based on reinforcement learning for mobile edge crowdsensing of IoT

With the maturity and development of 5G field,Mobile Edge CrowdSensing(MECS),as an intelligent data collection paradigm,provides a broad prospect for various applications in IoT.However,sensing users as data uploaders lack a balance between data benefits and privacy threats,leading to conservative data uploads and low revenue or excessive uploads and privacy breaches.To solve this problem,a Dynamic Privacy Measurement and Protection(DPMP)framework is proposed based on differential privacy and reinforcement learning.Firstly,a DPM model is designed to quantify the amount of data privacy,and a calculation method for personalized privacy threshold of different users is also designed.Furthermore,a Dynamic Private sensing data Selection(DPS)algorithm is proposed to help sensing users maximize data benefits within their privacy thresholds.Finally,theoretical analysis and ample experiment results show that DPMP framework is effective and efficient to achieve a balance between data benefits and sensing user privacy protection,in particular,the proposed DPMP framework has 63%and 23%higher training efficiency and data benefits,respectively,compared to the Monte Carlo algorithm.

Online Learning-Based Offloading Decision and Resource Allocation in Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

Mobile edge computing(MEC)-enabled satellite-terrestrial networks(STNs)can provide Internet of Things(IoT)devices with global computing services.Sometimes,the network state information is uncertain or unknown.To deal with this situation,we investigate online learning-based offloading decision and resource allocation in MEC-enabled STNs in this paper.The problem of minimizing the average sum task completion delay of all IoT devices over all time periods is formulated.We decompose this optimization problem into a task offloading decision problem and a computing resource allocation problem.A joint optimization scheme of offloading decision and resource allocation is then proposed,which consists of a task offloading decision algorithm based on the devices cooperation aided upper confidence bound(UCB)algorithm and a computing resource allocation algorithm based on the Lagrange multiplier method.Simulation results validate that the proposed scheme performs better than other baseline schemes.

Characteristics of long-distance mobile mRNAs from shoot to root in grafted plant species

Thousands of long-distance mobile mRNAs were identified from different grafting systems,based on high-throughput sequencing technology.Moreover,the long-distance delivery of RNAs was proved to involve multiple mechanisms.Here,we analyzed the homology,motif,and tRNA-like structure(TLS)of long-distance mobile mRNAs identified by RNA-seq as well as the RNA-binding protein(RBP)in nine grafting combinations including Arabidopsis thaliana,Vitis vinifera,Cucumis sativus,Citrullus lanatus,Nicotiana benthamiana,Malus domestica,Pyrus spp.,Glycine max and Phaseolus vulgaris.Although several mRNAs were found to be shared in herbaceous,woody,and related species,the vast majority of long-distance mobile mRNAs were species-specific.Four non-specific movement-related motifs were identified,while the TLS was not necessary for mRNA long distance mobility.In addition,we found that RBPs were conserved among herbaceous and woody plants as well as related species.This paper reports a further in-depth analysis of the endogenous mechanisms by which the species-specific transportable m RNAs were selected by bioinformatics,in order to provide insights for future research on long-distance mobile mRNAs.