Applications of Game Theory in Vehicular Networks: A Survey

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, vehicles and other intelligent components in an intelligent transportation system (ITS) are connected, forming Vehicular Networks (VNs) that provide efficient and secure traffic and ubiquitous access to various applications. However, as the number of nodes in ITS increases, it is challenging to satisfy a varied and large number of service requests with different Quality of Service and security requirements in highly dynamic VNs. Intelligent nodes in VNs can compete or cooperate for limited network resources to achieve either an individual or a group's objectives. Game Theory (GT), a theoretical framework designed for strategic interactions among rational decision-makers sharing scarce resources, can be used to model and analyze individual or group behaviors of communicating entities in VNs. This paper primarily surveys the recent developments of GT in solving various challenges of VNs. This survey starts with an introduction to the background of VNs. A review of GT models studied in the VNs is then introduced, including its basic concepts, classifications, and applicable vehicular issues. After discussing the requirements of VNs and the motivation of using GT, a comprehensive literature review on GT applications in dealing with the challenges of current VNs is provided. Furthermore, recent contributions of GT to VNs integrating with diverse emerging 5G technologies are surveyed. Finally, the lessons learned are given, and several key research challenges and possible solutions for applying GT in VNs are outlined.Comment: It has been submitted to "IEEE communication surveys and tutorials".This is the revised versio

End-to-End Design for Self-Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms

More widespread adoption requires swarms of robots to be more flexible for real-world applications. Multiple challenges remain in complex scenarios where a large amount of data needs to be processed in real-time and high degrees of situational awareness are required. The options in this direction are limited in existing robotic swarms, mostly homogeneous robots with limited operational and reconfiguration flexibility. We address this by bringing elastic computing techniques and dynamic resource management from the edge-cloud computing domain to the swarm robotics domain. This enables the dynamic provisioning of collective capabilities in the swarm for different applications. Therefore, we transform a swarm into a distributed sensing and computing platform capable of complex data processing tasks, which can then be offered as a service. In particular, we discuss how this can be applied to adaptive resource management in a heterogeneous swarm of drones, and how we are implementing the dynamic deployment of distributed data processing algorithms. With an elastic drone swarm built on reconfigurable hardware and containerized services, it will be possible to raise the self-awareness, degree of intelligence, and level of autonomy of heterogeneous swarms of robots. We describe novel directions for collaborative perception, and new ways of interacting with a robotic swarm

Game Theoretic Approaches in Vehicular Networks: A Survey

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles and other intelligent components in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are connected, forming the Vehicular Networks (VNs) that provide efficient and secure traffic, ubiquitous access to information, and various applications. However, as the number of connected nodes keeps increasing, it is challenging to satisfy various and large amounts of service requests with different Quality of Service (QoS ) and security requirements in the highly dynamic VNs. Intelligent nodes in VNs can compete or cooperate for limited network resources so that either an individual or group objectives can be achieved. Game theory, a theoretical framework designed for strategic interactions among rational decision-makers who faced with scarce resources, can be used to model and analyze individual or group behaviors of communication entities in VNs. This paper primarily surveys the recent advantages of GT used in solving various challenges in VNs. As VNs and GT have been extensively investigate34d, this survey starts with a brief introduction of the basic concept and classification of GT used in VNs. Then, a comprehensive review of applications of GT in VNs is presented, which primarily covers the aspects of QoS and security. Moreover, with the development of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication, recent contributions of GT to diverse emerging technologies of 5G integrated into VNs are surveyed in this paper. Finally, several key research challenges and possible solutions for applying GT in VNs are outlined

Energy-Efficient Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing with Edge-Cloud Collaboration

Multiple access mobile edge computing is an emerging technique to bring computation resources close to end mobile users. By deploying edge servers at WiFi access points or cellular base stations, the computation capabilities of mobile users can be extended. Existing works mostly assume the remote cloud server can be viewed as a special edge server or the edge servers are willing to cooperate, which is not practical. In this work, we propose an edge-cloud cooperative architecture where edge servers can rent for the remote cloud servers to expedite the computation of tasks from mobile users. With this architecture, the computation offloading problem is modeled as a mixed integer programming with delay constraints, which is NP-hard. The objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile devices. We propose a greedy algorithm as well as a simulated annealing algorithm to effectively solve the problem. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed greedy algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm can achieve the near optimal performance. On average, the proposed greedy algorithm can achieve the same application completing time budget performance of the Brute Force optional algorithm with only 31\% extra energy cost. The simulated annealing algorithm can achieve similar performance with the greedy algorithm.Comment: Accepted by the 18th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP 2018

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

An Efficient Mechanism for Computation Offloading in Mobile-Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology that provides cloud and IT services within the proximity of the mobile user. With the increasing number of mobile applications, mobile devices (MD) encounter limitations of their resources, such as battery life and computation capacity. The computation offloading in MEC can help mobile users to reduce battery usage and speed up task execution. Although there are many solutions for offloading in MEC, most usually only employ one MEC server for improving mobile device energy consumption and execution time. Instead of conventional centralized optimization methods, the current paper considers a decentralized optimization mechanism between MEC servers and users. In particular, an assignment mechanism called school choice is employed to assist heterogeneous users to select different MEC operators in a distributed environment. With this mechanism, each user can benefit from minimizing the price and energy consumption of executing tasks while also meeting the specified deadline. The present research has designed an efficient mechanism for a computation offloading scheme that achieves minimal price and energy consumption under latency constraints. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can attain efficient and successful computation offloading.Comment: 36 page

Auction Mechanisms in Cloud/Fog Computing Resource Allocation for Public Blockchain Networks

As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as miners, in the network with incentives for confirming new block of transactions through a process of "block mining" by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Under the circumstance of limited local computing resources, e.g., mobile devices, it is natural for rational miners, i.e., consensus nodes, to offload computational tasks for proof of work to the cloud/fog computing servers. Therefore, we focus on the trading between the cloud/fog computing service provider and miners, and propose an auction-based market model for efficient computing resource allocation. In particular, we consider a proof-of-work based blockchain network. Due to the competition among miners in the blockchain network, the allocative externalities are particularly taken into account when designing the auction mechanisms. Specifically, we consider two bidding schemes: the constant-demand scheme where each miner bids for a fixed quantity of resources, and the multi-demand scheme where the miners can submit their preferable demands and bids. For the constant-demand bidding scheme, we propose an auction mechanism that achieves optimal social welfare. In the multi-demand bidding scheme, the social welfare maximization problem is NP-hard. Therefore, we design an approximate algorithm which guarantees the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed auction mechanisms with the two bidding schemes can efficiently maximize the social welfare of the blockchain network and provide effective strategies for the cloud/fog computing service provider.Comment: 15 page

Mobile Edge Intelligence and Computing for the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging paradigm, driven by recent advancements in vehicular communications and networking. Advances in research can now provide reliable communication links between vehicles, via vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and between vehicles and roadside infrastructures, via vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. Meanwhile, the capability and intelligence of vehicles are being rapidly enhanced, and this will have the potential of supporting a plethora of new exciting applications, which will integrate fully autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the environment. These trends will bring about an era of intelligent IoV, which will heavily depend upon communications, computing, and data analytics technologies. To store and process the massive amount of data generated by intelligent IoV, onboard processing and Cloud computing will not be sufficient, due to resource/power constraints and communication overhead/latency, respectively. By deploying storage and computing resources at the wireless network edge, e.g., radio access points, the edge information system (EIS), including edge caching, edge computing, and edge AI, will play a key role in the future intelligent IoV. Such system will provide not only low-latency content delivery and computation services, but also localized data acquisition, aggregation and processing. This article surveys the latest development in EIS for intelligent IoV. Key design issues, methodologies and hardware platforms are introduced. In particular, typical use cases for intelligent vehicles are illustrated, including edge-assisted perception, mapping, and localization. In addition, various open research problems are identified.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Proceedings of the IEE

Vehicular Edge Computing and Networking: A Survey

As one key enabler of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) has received remarkable interest from academia and industry. The emerging vehicular applications and the exponential growing data have naturally led to the increased needs of communication, computation and storage resources, and also to strict performance requirements on response time and network bandwidth. In order to deal with these challenges, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is regarded as a promising solution. MEC pushes powerful computational and storage capacities from the remote cloud to the edge of networks in close proximity of vehicular users, which enables low latency and reduced bandwidth consumption. Driven by the benefits of MEC, many efforts have been devoted to integrating vehicular networks into MEC, thereby forming a novel paradigm named as Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of state-of-art research on VEC. First of all, we provide an overview of VEC, including the introduction, architecture, key enablers, advantages, challenges as well as several attractive application scenarios. Then, we describe several typical research topics where VEC is applied. After that, we present a careful literature review on existing research work in VEC by classification. Finally, we identify open research issues and discuss future research directions