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Zhaolong Ning

Publications and source records attributed to Zhaolong Ning.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Mobility-aware Seamless Service Migration and Resource Allocation in Multi-edge IoV Systems

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) offers low-latency and high-bandwidth support for Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) applications. However, due to high vehicle mobility and finite communication coverage of base stations, it is hard to maintain uninterrupted and high-quality services without proper service migration among MEC servers. Existing solutions commonly rely on prior knowledge and rarely consider efficient resource allocation during the service migration process, making it hard to reach optimal performance in dynamic IoV environments. To address these important challenges, we propose SR-CL, a novel mobility-aware seamless Service migration and Resource allocation framework via Convex-optimization-enabled deep reinforcement Learning in multi-edge IoV systems. First, we decouple the Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem of service migration and resource allocation into two sub-problems. Next, we design a new actor-critic-based asynchronous-update deep reinforcement learning method to handle service migration, where the delayed-update actor makes migration decisions and the one-step-update critic evaluates the decisions to guide the policy update. Notably, we theoretically derive the optimal resource allocation with convex optimization for each MEC server, thereby further improving system performance. Using the real-world datasets of vehicle trajectories and testbed, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed SR-CL. Compared to benchmark methods, the SR-CL achieves superior convergence and delay performance under various scenarios.

cs.NI

6G Communication New Paradigm: The Integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

With the continuous development of Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), their combination has become foundational technologies to complement the terrestrial network by providing communication enhancement services for large-scale users. This article provides a comprehensive overview of IRS-assisted UAV communications for 6th-Generation (6G) networks. First, the applications supported by IRS-assisted UAV communications for 6G networks are introduced, and key issues originated from applications supported by IRSs and UAVs for 6G networks are summarized and analyzed. Then, prototypes and main technologies related to the integration of IRSs and UAVs are introduced. Driven by applications and technologies of IRS-assisted UAV communications, existing solutions in the realms of energy-constrained communications, secure communications, and enhanced communications are summarized, and corresponding empirical lessons are provided. Finally, we discuss some research challenges and open issues in IRS-assisted UAV communications, offering directions for the future development.

cs.NI

A Survey on Trustworthy Edge Intelligence: From Security and Reliability To Transparency and Sustainability

Edge Intelligence (EI) integrates Edge Computing (EC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to push the capabilities of AI to the network edge for real-time, efficient and secure intelligent decision-making and computation. However, EI faces various challenges due to resource constraints, heterogeneous network environments, and diverse service requirements of different applications, which together affect the trustworthiness of EI in the eyes of stakeholders. This survey comprehensively summarizes the characteristics, architecture, technologies, and solutions of trustworthy EI. Specifically, we first emphasize the need for trustworthy EI in the context of the trend toward large models. We then provide an initial definition of trustworthy EI, explore its key characteristics and give a multi-layered architecture for trustworthy EI. Then, we summarize several important issues that hinder the achievement of trustworthy EI. Subsequently, we present enabling technologies for trustworthy EI systems and provide an in-depth literature review of the state-of-the-art solutions for realizing the trustworthiness of EI. Finally, we discuss the corresponding research challenges and open issues.

cs.LG

Joint User Association, Interference Cancellation and Power Control for Multi-IRS Assisted UAV Communications

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications are expected to alleviate the load of ground base stations in a cost-effective way. Existing studies mainly focus on the deployment and resource allocation of a single IRS instead of multiple IRSs, whereas it is extremely challenging for joint multi-IRS multi-user association in UAV communications with constrained reflecting resources and dynamic scenarios. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a new optimization algorithm for joint IRS-user association, trajectory optimization of UAVs, successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order scheduling and power allocation to maximize system energy efficiency. We first propose an inverse soft-Q learning-based algorithm to optimize multi-IRS multi-user association. Then, SCA and Dinkelbach-based algorithm are leveraged to optimize UAV trajectory followed by the optimization of SIC decoding order scheduling and power allocation. Finally, theoretical analysis and performance results show significant advantages of the designed algorithm in convergence rate and energy efficiency.

cs.IT

Wireless Powered Metaverse: Joint Task Scheduling and Trajectory Design for Multi-Devices and Multi-UAVs

To support the running of human-centric metaverse applications on mobile devices, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing (WPMEC) is promising to compensate for limited computational capabilities and energy supplies of mobile devices. The high-speed computational processing demands and significant energy consumption of metaverse applications require joint resource scheduling of multiple devices and UAVs, but existing WPMEC solutions address either device or UAV scheduling due to the complexity of combinatorial optimization. To solve the above challenge, we propose a two-stage alternating optimization algorithm based on multi-task Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to jointly allocate charging time, schedule computation tasks, and optimize trajectory of UAVs and mobile devices in a wireless powered metaverse scenario. First, considering energy constraints of both UAVs and mobile devices, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the computation efficiency of the system. Second, we propose a heuristic algorithm to efficiently perform time allocation and charging scheduling for mobile devices. Following this, we design a multi-task DRL scheme to make charging scheduling and trajectory design decisions for UAVs. Finally, theoretical analysis and performance results demonstrate that our algorithm exhibits significant advantages over representative methods in terms of convergence speed and average computation efficiency.

cs.DC

A Survey on Off-chain Networks: Frameworks, Technologies, Solutions and Challenges

Blockchain has received increasing attention in academia and industry. However, the increasing transaction volumes and limited on-chain storage underscore scalability as a key challenge hindering the widespread adoption of blockchain. Fortunately, off-chain networks that enable transactions outside the blockchain show promising potential to mitigate the scalability challenge. Off-chain solutions that address blockchain scalability hurdles, such as payment channel networks, facilitate secure and fast off-chain transactions, thus relieving the main chain's strain. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of key technologies, solutions, and challenges of off-chain networks. First, we introduce the background of off-chain networks encompassing design motivation, framework, overview, and application scenarios. We then review the key issues and technologies associated with off-chain networks. Subsequently, we summarize the mainstream solutions for the corresponding key issues. Finally, we discuss some research challenges and open issues in this area.

cs.CR

The Role of Positive and Negative Citations in Scientific Evaluation

Quantifying the impact of scientific papers objectively is crucial for research output assessment, which subsequently affects institution and country rankings, research funding allocations, academic recruitment and national/international scientific priorities. While most of the assessment schemes based on publication citations may potentially be manipulated through negative citations, in this study, we explore Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships and discover negative citations and subsequently weaken the associated citation strength. PANDORA (Positive And Negative COI- Distinguished Objective Rank Algorithm) has been developed, which captures the positive and negative COI, together with the positive and negative suspected COI relationships. In order to alleviate the influence caused by negative COI relationship, collaboration times, collaboration time span, citation times and citation time span are employed to determine the citing strength; while for positive COI relationship, we regard it as normal citation relationship. Furthermore, we calculate the impact of scholarly papers by PageRank and HITS algorithms, based on a credit allocation algorithm which is utilized to assess the impact of institutions fairly and objectively. Experiments are conducted on the publication dataset from American Physical Society (APS) dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current solutions in Recommendation Intensity of list R at top-K and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient at top-K.

cs.DL

An Overview on Evaluating and Predicting Scholarly Article Impact

Scholarly article impact reflects the significance of academic output recognised by academic peers, and it often plays a crucial role in assessing the scientific achievements of researchers, teams, institutions and countries. It is also used for addressing various needs in the academic and scientific arena, such as recruitment decisions, promotions, and funding allocations. This article provides a comprehensive review of recent progresses related to article impact assessment and prediction. The~review starts by sharing some insight into the article impact research and outlines current research status. Some core methods and recent progress are presented to outline how article impact metrics and prediction have evolved to consider integrating multiple networks. Key techniques, including statistical analysis, machine learning, data mining and network science, are discussed. In particular, we highlight important applications of each technique in article impact research. Subsequently, we discuss the open issues and challenges of article impact research. At the same time, this review points out some important research directions, including article impact evaluation by considering Conflict of Interest, time and location information, various distributions of scholarly entities, and rising stars.

cs.DL

A Survey on Human-centric Communications in Non-cooperative Wireless Relay Networks

The performance of data delivery in wireless relay networks (WRNs), such as delay-tolerant networks and device-to-device communications heavily relies on the cooperation of mobile nodes (i.e., users and their carried devices). However, selfish nodes may refuse to relay data to others or share their resources with them due to various reasons, such as resource limitations or social preferences. Meanwhile, misbehaving nodes can launch different types of internal attacks (e.g., blackhole and trust-related attacks) to disrupt the normal operation of the network. Numerous mechanisms have been recently proposed to establish secure and efficient communications in WRNs in the presence of selfish and malicious nodes (referred as non-cooperative WRNs). In this paper, we present an in-depth survey on human-centric communication challenges and solutions in the non-cooperative WRNs that focuses on: (1) an overview of the non-cooperative WRNs and introduction to various types of node selfish and malicious behaviors, (2) the impact analysis of node selfish and malicious behaviors on the performance of data forwarding and distribution, (3) selfish and malicious node detection and defense systems, and (4) incentive mechanisms. Finally, we discuss several open problems and future research challenges.

cs.NI