Ruijie Wang

This paper introduces PhyMask, an adaptive masking paradigm designed to enhance the efficiency and interpretability of Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) in analyzing IoT sensing signals. Different from all mainstream MAEs, which rely on random masking techniques, PhyMask employs an adaptive masking strategy that aligns with critical signal information. Its main contributions are threefold. First, PhyMask leverages the energy significance of frequency components to prioritize information-rich time-frequency regions, improving the reconstruction of original signals. Second, it includes a coherence-based masking component to identify and preserve essential temporal dynamics within the data. Finally, PhyMask integrates these components into an adaptive masking paradigm tailored to optimize the sensing context awareness within the masking configuration, focusing on the most informative parts of the data. This allows PhyMask to mask up to 96% of the input, reducing memory requirements by 14% and accelerating pre-training. Evaluations across two sensing applications, four datasets, and two real-world deployments demonstrate PhyMask's superior performance. PhyMask improves MAE accuracy by 7%, reduces pre-training data requirements by up to 75%, and enhances robustness to domain shifts and signal quality variations, making it of great value to robust and efficient intelligent IoT deployments.

Owing to network function virtualization (NFV), each industrial application is constructed as a service function chain (SFC), concatenating the ordered service functions, to offer applications more flexibly in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). When it comes to the emerging edge intelligence, the integration of NFV with edge in IIoT would enable more close-proximity services, yet also posing new challenges owing to more complicated environment. Although some efforts have been made to service function chaining in IIoT, the radio resource dynamics are not fully perceived. In this article, we investigate the radio-aware SFC deployment in the edge-enabled IIoT. First, a radio-aware deployment formulation is exhibited, steering the flow traversing both wireless and wired links. Next, Markov decision process is exhibited to track dynamics in both IIoT and radio resources. Afterwards, the natural gradient-based actor-critic SFC paradigm is introduced to adapt to network variation, by incorporating the curvature of parameter space into gradient information. To resolve the high-dimensionality in action space, we then recur to the norm penalty approach, reducing the space size by two orders of magnitude. Finally, numerical experiments are executed to uncover superiority of presented method, disclosing that the latency performance benefits from both the SFC routing between IIoT servers and elaborated wireless resource orchestration.

As an emerging type of Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV) denotes the vehicle network capable of supporting diverse types of intelligent services and has attracted great attention in the 5G era. In this study, we consider the multimedia content caching with multicast beamforming in IoV-based vehicular edge networks. First, we formulate a joint vehicle-to-vehicle- (V2V-) assisted clustering, caching, and multicasting optimization problem, to minimize the weighted sum of flow cost and power cost, subject to the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints for each multicast group. Then, with the two-timescale setup, the intractable and stochastic original problem is decoupled at separate timescales. More precisely, at the large timescale, we leverage the sample average approximation (SAA) technique to solve the joint V2V-assisted clustering and caching problem and then demonstrate the equivalence of optimal solutions between the original problem and its relaxed linear programming (LP) counterpart; and at the small timescale, we leverage the successive convex approximation (SCA) method to solve the nonconvex multicast beamforming problem, whereby a series of convex subproblems can be acquired, with the convergence also assured. Finally, simulations are conducted with different system parameters to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, revealing that the network performance can benefit from not only the power saving from wireless multicast beamforming in vehicular networks but also the content caching among vehicles.