Task Allocation among Connected Devices: Requirements, Approaches and Challenges

Task allocation (TA) is essential when deploying application tasks to systems of connected devices with dissimilar and time-varying characteristics. The challenge of an efficient TA is to assign the tasks to the best devices, according to the context and task requirements. The main purpose of this paper is to study the different connotations of the concept of TA efficiency, and the key factors that most impact on it, so that relevant design guidelines can be defined. The paper first analyzes the domains of connected devices where TA has an important role, which brings to this classification: Internet of Things (IoT), Sensor and Actuator Networks (SAN), Multi-Robot Systems (MRS), Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper then demonstrates that the impact of the key factors on the domains actually affects the design choices of the state-of-the-art TA solutions. It results that resource management has most significantly driven the design of TA algorithms in all domains, especially IoT and SAN. The fulfillment of coverage requirements is important for the definition of TA solutions in MCS and UAV. Quality of Information requirements are mostly included in MCS TA strategies, similar to the design of appropriate incentives. The paper also discusses the issues that need to be addressed by future research activities, i.e.: allowing interoperability of platforms in the implementation of TA functionalities; introducing appropriate trust evaluation algorithms; extending the list of tasks performed by objects; designing TA strategies where network service providers have a role in TA functionalities’ provisioning

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Smart Communities

In 2016, the Japanese Government publicized an initiative and a call to action for the implementation of a Super Smart Society announced as Society 5.0. The stated goal of Society 5.0 is to meet the various needs of the members of society through the provisioning of goods and services to those who require them, when they are required and in the amount required, thus enabling the citizens to live an active and comfortable life. In spite of its genuine appeal, details of a feasible path to Society 5.0 are conspicuously missing. The first main goal of this survey is to suggest such an implementation path. Specifically, we define a Smart Community as a human-centric entity where technology is used to equip the citizenry with information and services that they can use to inform their decisions. The arbiter of this ecosystem of services is a Marketplace of Services that will reward services aligned with the wants and needs of the citizens, while discouraging the proliferation of those that are not. In the limit, the Smart Community we defined will morph into Society 5.0. At that point, the Marketplace of Services will become a platform for the co-creation of services by a close cooperation between the citizens and their government. The second objective and contribution of this survey paper is to review known technologies that, in our opinion, will play a significant role in the transition to Society 5.0. These technologies will be surveyed in chronological order, as newer technologies often extend old technologies while avoiding their limitations

Spatial crowdsourcing with mobile agents in vehicular networks

In the last years, the automotive industry has shown interest in the addition of computing and communication devices to cars, thanks to technological advances in these fields, in order to meet the increasing demand of “connected” applications and services. Although vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have not been fully developed yet, they could be used in a near future as a means to provide a number of interesting applications and services that need the exchange of data among vehicles and other data sources. In this paper, we propose a spatial crowdsourcing schema for the opportunistic collection of information within an interest area in a city or region (e.g., measures about the environment, such as the concentration of certain gases in the atmosphere, or information such as the availability of parking spaces in an area), using vehicular ad hoc communications. We present a method that exploits mobile agent technology to accomplish the distributed collection and querying of data among vehicles in such a scenario. Our proposal is supported by an extensive set of realistic simulations that prove the feasibility of the approach

Smart Communities: From Sensors to Internet of Things and to a Marketplace of Services

Our paper was inspired by the recent Society 5.0 initiative of the Japanese Government that seeks to create a sustainable human-centric society by putting to work recent advances in technology: sensor networks, edge computing, IoT ecosystems, AI, Big Data, robotics, to name just a few. The main contribution of this work is a vision of how these technological advances can contribute, directly or indirectly, to making Society 5.0 reality. For this purpose we build on a recently-proposed concept of Marketplace of Services that, in our view, will turn out to be one of the cornerstones of Society 5.0. Instead of referring to Society 5.0 directly, throughout the paper we shall define a generic Smart Community that implements a subset of the goals of Society 5.0. We show how digital technology in conjunction with the Marketplace of services can contribute to enabling and promoting sustainable Smart Communities. Very much like Society 5.0, our Smart Community can provide a large number of di verse and evolving human-centric services offered as utilities and sold on a metered basis. The services offered by the Smart Community can be synthesized, using the latest technology (e.g. 3D printing, robotics, Big Data analytics, AI, etc.), from a hierarchy of raw resources or other services. The residents of the Smart Community can purchase as much or as little of these services as they find suitable to their needs and are billed according to a pay-as-you-go business model

An Efficient Collaboration and Incentive Mechanism for Internet-of-Vehicles (IoVs) with Secured Information Exchange Based on Blockchains

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordWith the rapid development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), mobile crowdsensing, i.e., outsourcing sensing tasks to mobile devices or vehicles, has been proposed to address the problem of data collection in the scenarios such as smart city. Despite its benefits for a wide range of applications, mobile crowdsensing lacks an efficient incentive mechanism, restricting the development of IoT applications, especially for Internet-ofVehicles (IoV) – a typical example of IoT applications; this is because vehicles are usually reluctant to participate these sensing tasks. Moreover, in practice some sensing tasks may arrive suddenly (called an emergent task) in the IoV environment, but the resources of a single vehicle may be insufficient to handle, and thus multi-vehicles collaboration is required. In this case, the incentive mechanisms for the participation of multiple vehicles and the task scheduling for their collaborations are collectively needed. To address this important problem, we firstly propose a new model for the scenario of two vehicles collaboration, considering the situation of emergent appearance of a task. In this model, for a general sensing task, we propose a bidding mechanism to better encourage vehicles to contribute their resources, and the tasks for those vehicles are scheduled accordingly. Secondly, for an emergent task, a novel time-window based method is devised to manage the tasks among vehicles and to incent the vehicles to participate. Finally, we develop a blockchain framework to achieve the secured information exchange through smart contract for the proposed models in IoV.National Key Research and Development Program of ChinaNational Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)Purple Mountain Laboratory: Networking, Communications and SecurityAcademician Expert Workstation of Bitvalue Technology (Hunan) Company Limite

A Survey on Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices of a large number of participants or a crowd. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are deployed widely and already equipped with a rich set of sensors, making them an excellent source of information. Mobility and intelligence of humans guarantee higher coverage and better context awareness if compared to traditional sensor networks. At the same time, individuals may be reluctant to share data for privacy concerns. For this reason, MCS frameworks are specifically designed to include incentive mechanisms and address privacy concerns. Despite the growing interest in the research community, MCS solutions need a deeper investigation and categorization on many aspects that span from sensing and communication to system management and data storage. In this paper, we take the research on MCS a step further by presenting a survey on existing works in the domain and propose a detailed taxonomy to shed light on the current landscape and classify applications, methodologies, and architectures. Our objective is not only to analyze and consolidate past research but also to outline potential future research directions and synergies with other research areas