No Arabic abstract
Sixth-Generation (6G)-based Internet of Everything applications (e.g. autonomous driving cars) have witnessed a remarkable interest. Autonomous driving cars using federated learning (FL) has the ability to enable different smart services. Although FL implements distributed machine learning model training without the requirement to move the data of devices to a centralized server, it its own implementation challenges such as robustness, centralized server security, communication resources constraints, and privacy leakage due to the capability of a malicious aggregation server to infer sensitive information of end-devices. To address the aforementioned limitations, a dispersed federated learning (DFL) framework for autonomous driving cars is proposed to offer robust, communication resource-efficient, and privacy-aware learning. A mixed-integer non-linear (MINLP) optimization problem is formulated to jointly minimize the loss in federated learning model accuracy due to packet errors and transmission latency. Due to the NP-hard and non-convex nature of the formulated MINLP problem, we propose the Block Successive Upper-bound Minimization (BSUM) based solution. Furthermore, the performance comparison of the proposed scheme with three baseline schemes has been carried out. Extensive numerical results are provided to show the validity of the proposed BSUM-based scheme.
6G technology targets to revolutionize the mobility industry by revamping the role of wireless connections. In this article, we draw out our vision on an intelligent, cooperative, and sustainable mobility environment of the future, discussing how 6G will positively impact mobility services and applications. The scenario in focus is a densely populated area by smart connected entities that are mutually connected over a 6G virtual bus, which enables access to an extensive and always up-to-date set of context-sensitive information. The augmented dataset is functional to let vehicles engage in adaptive and cooperative learning mechanisms, enabling fully automated functionalities with higher communication integrity and reduced risk of accidents while being a sentient and collaborative processing node of the same ecosystem. Smart sensing and communication technologies are discussed herein, and their convergence is devised by the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence in centralized or distributed and federated network architectures.
Due to the advanced capabilities of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) components such as vehicles, Roadside Units (RSUs) and smart devices as well as the increasing amount of data generated, Federated Learning (FL) becomes a promising tool given that it enables privacy-preserving machine learning that can be implemented in the IoV. However, the performance of the FL suffers from the failure of communication links and missing nodes, especially when continuous exchanges of model parameters are required. Therefore, we propose the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as wireless relays to facilitate the communications between the IoV components and the FL server and thus improving the accuracy of the FL. However, a single UAV may not have sufficient resources to provide services for all iterations of the FL process. In this paper, we present a joint auction-coalition formation framework to solve the allocation of UAV coalitions to groups of IoV components. Specifically, the coalition formation game is formulated to maximize the sum of individual profits of the UAVs. The joint auction-coalition formation algorithm is proposed to achieve a stable partition of UAV coalitions in which an auction scheme is applied to solve the allocation of UAV coalitions. The auction scheme is designed to take into account the preferences of IoV components over heterogeneous UAVs. The simulation results show that the grand coalition, where all UAVs join a single coalition, is not always stable due to the profit-maximizing behavior of the UAVs. In addition, we show that as the cooperation cost of the UAVs increases, the UAVs prefer to support the IoV components independently and not to form any coalition.
In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient framework for an electric vehicle (EV) network using a contract theoretic-based economic model to maximize the profits of charging stations (CSs) and improve the social welfare of the network. Specifically, we first introduce CS-based and CS clustering-based decentralized federated energy learning (DFEL) approaches which enable the CSs to train their own energy transactions locally to predict energy demands. In this way, each CS can exchange its learned model with other CSs to improve prediction accuracy without revealing actual datasets and reduce communication overhead among the CSs. Based on the energy demand prediction, we then design a multi-principal one-agent (MPOA) contract-based method. In particular, we formulate the CSs utility maximization as a non-collaborative energy contract problem in which each CS maximizes its utility under common constraints from the smart grid provider (SGP) and other CSs contracts. Then, we prove the existence of an equilibrium contract solution for all the CSs and develop an iterative algorithm at the SGP to find the equilibrium. Through simulation results using the dataset of CSs transactions in Dundee city, the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2018, we demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve the energy demand prediction accuracy improvement up to 24.63% and lessen communication overhead by 96.3% compared with other machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, our proposed method can outperform non-contract-based economic models by 35% and 36% in terms of the CSs utilities and social welfare of the network, respectively.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used in autonomous driving tasks and training RL models typically involves in a multi-step process: pre-training RL models on simulators, uploading the pre-trained model to real-life robots, and fine-tuning the weight parameters on robot vehicles. This sequential process is extremely time-consuming and more importantly, knowledge from the fine-tuned model stays local and can not be re-used or leveraged collaboratively. To tackle this problem, we present an online federated RL transfer process for real-time knowledge extraction where all the participant agents make corresponding actions with the knowledge learned by others, even when they are acting in very different environments. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we constructed a real-life collision avoidance system with Microsoft Airsim simulator and NVIDIA JetsonTX2 car agents, which cooperatively learn from scratch to avoid collisions in indoor environment with obstacle objects. We demonstrate that with the proposed framework, the simulator car agents can transfer knowledge to the RC cars in real-time, with 27% increase in the average distance with obstacles and 42% decrease in the collision counts.
In a level-5 autonomous driving system, the autonomous driving vehicles (AVs) are expected to sense the surroundings via analyzing a large amount of data captured by a variety of onboard sensors in near-real-time. As a result, enormous computing costs will be introduced to the AVs for processing the tasks with the deployed machine learning (ML) model, while the inference accuracy may not be guaranteed. In this context, the advent of edge intelligence (EI) and sixth-generation (6G) wireless networking are expected to pave the way to more reliable and safer autonomous driving by providing multi-access edge computing (MEC) together with ML to AVs in close proximity. To realize this goal, we propose a two-tier EI-empowered autonomous driving framework. In the autonomous-vehicles tier, the autonomous vehicles are deployed with the shallow layers by splitting the trained deep neural network model. In the edge-intelligence tier, an edge server is implemented with the remaining layers (also deep layers) and an appropriately trained multi-task learning (MTL) model. In particular, obtaining the optimal offloading strategy (including the binary offloading decision and the computational resources allocation) can be formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is solved via MTL in near-real-time with high accuracy. On another note, an edge-vehicle joint inference is proposed through neural network segmentation to achieve efficient online inference with data privacy-preserving and less communication delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and open research topics are finally listed.