Liang Zhao

Shenyang Aerospace University | SAU · Computer Science

Software-Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) is a networking architecture that can provide centralized control for vehicular networks. However, the design for routing policies in SDVNs is generally influenced by several limitations, such as frequent topological changes, complex service requests, and long model training time. Intelligent Digital Twin-b...

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is the transportation version of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in road scenarios. One key technology of VEC is task offloading, which allows vehicles to send their computation tasks to the surrounding Roadside Units (RSUs) or other vehicles for execution, thereby reducing computation delay and energy consumption. Howeve...

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising paradigm that exposes Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to road scenarios. In VEC, task offloading can enable vehicles to offload the computing tasks to nearby Roadside Units (RSUs) that deploy computing capabilities. However, the highly dynamic network topology, strict low-delay constraints, and massive data o...

To provide efficient networking services at the edge of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV), Software-Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) has been a promising technology to enable intelligent data exchange without giving additional duties to the resource constrained vehicles. Compared with conventional centralized SDVNs, hybrid SDVNs combine the centralized co...

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is the transportation version of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). In VEC, task offloading enables vehicles to offload computing tasks to nearby Roadside Units (RSUs), thereby reducing the computation cost. Recent trends in task offloading cause a proliferation of studies in academia. However, the existing offloading schem...

This paper studies distributed data dissemination in multiple mobile sinks wireless sensor networks. Previous studies employed separated paths to disseminate data packets from a given source to a given set of mobile sinks independently, which exhausts the constrained resources of the network. In this paper, we explore how the merged paths mechanism...

Breakthroughs in Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) technologies have revitalized Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). However, how to schedule mobile chargers rationally has been quite a tricky problem. Most of the current work does not consider the variability of scenarios and how many mobile chargers should be scheduled as the most appropr...

Vehicular crowd sensing (VCS), emerging as a new paradigm within mobile crowd sensing, leverages vehicles as the participator, which can obtain broader sensing coverage and higher sensing flexibility. Previous works ignored the strong impact of environmental factors on workers' travel costs, as well as improper gains from speculative behavior (i.e....

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used to sense and monitor physical conditions in various services and applications. However, there are a number of challenges in deploying WSNs, especially those pertaining to energy replenishment. Using the current solutions, when a significant number of sensors need to replenish their energy, this would be cost...

This paper explores the convergence of Human-Centered AI (HCAI) and Cyber-Physical Social Systems (CPSS) in pursuing advanced Cognitive Situation Awareness (CSA). Integrating HCAI principles within CPSS fosters systems prioritizing human needs, values, and experiences, improving perception, understanding, and responsiveness to complex environments....

Empowered by their exceptional versatility and autonomy, unmanned vehicles (UxVs), including ground, aerial, surface and underwater vehicles, are emerging as promising tools to execute tasks ubiquitously. Due to the increasing complexity of the environment and tasks, cooperation among multiple UxVs of different types is often required, which signif...

Multi-hop broadcasting serves as an effective countermeasure against the negative impacts of rapid vehicular movement and internal interference on data transmission in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), thereby enhancing support for safety-critical applications. The selection of candidate forwarding vehicles within this multi-hop broadcasting para...

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is a disruptive technology that allows wireless energy provisioning for energy-limited IoT devices, thus decreasing the over-reliance on batteries and wires. WPT could replace conventional energy provisioning (e.g., energy harvesting) and expand to be deployed in many of our daily-life applications, including but not l...

In the era of data-driven healthcare, the amalgamation of blockchain and Federated Learning (FL) introduces a paradigm shift towards secure, collaborative, and patient-centric data-sharing. This paper pioneers the exploration of the conceptual framework and technical synergy of FL and blockchain for decentralized data-sharing, aiming to strike a ba...

In vehicular networks, some edge servers may not function properly due to the time-varying load condition and the uneven computing resource distribution, resulting in a low quality of caching services. To overcome this challenge, we develop a Vehicular dew computing (VDC) architecture for the first time by combining dew computing with vehicular net...

In wireless networks, meeting the performance requirements of all tasks solely with Internet of Things (IoT) devices is challenging due to their limited computational power and battery capacity. Given their flexibility and mobility, the application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the context of mobile edge computing (MEC) has garnered signifi...

Recently, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have seen increasing popularity owing to their extensive applications in aquatic environments, including monitoring underwater pipelines, detecting pollution and disasters, researching marine life, underwater surveillance, and facilitating military surveillance. In fact, the task of devising an...

With the increasing communications between the In-Vehicle Networks (IVNs) and external networks, security has become a stringent problem. In addition, the controller area network bus in IVN lacks security mechanisms by design, which is vulnerable to various attacks. Thus, it is important to detect IVN anomalies for complete vehicular security. Howe...

Under the framework of Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, although vehicles can avoid potential risks and improve traffic efficiency, shared vehicle data may have defects or faults due to inevitable environmental noise or potential sensor failures, which could pose dangers to drivers. Therefore, detecting anomalies in data transmitt...

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) utilize advanced technologies to enhance traffic safety and efficiency, contributing significantly to modern transportation. The integration of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) further elevates road safety and fosters the progress of ITS through enabling direct vehicle communication and interaction with infrastru...

By the limitations of storage capacity and computing power, IoT devices may prefer to outsource their valuable and sensitive data to cloud storage providers (CSPs) for further analysis, so it is critical to design protocols that can verify the integrity of these data remotely, while preserving the privacy of their owners. This paper proposes a nove...

Supporting Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in satellite-terrestrial networks (STN) provides essential offloading services for devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices in remote areas. However, when terrestrial demands for computing resources are high, the MEC servers on visible LEO satellites may suffer from insufficient capacity, while those o...

Agriculture 4.0 offers the potential to revolutionize the agriculture sector through improved productivity and efficiency. However, adopting Agriculture 4.0 requires a period of transition and effort. Satellite-Airborne sensing technologies may become an opening enabler technology of this new paradigm due to its fast deployment process and flexible...

Control- and User-Plane Separation (CUPS) and Space Cellular Networks (SCNs) are promising solutions for delivering ubiquitous connectivity and high-traffic wireless services on a global scale. Nevertheless, the potential benefit of CUPS in the separation networks' coverage and data service functions has not been fully leveraged in enabling reliabl...

As a key service of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), vehicle advertising can capture the interest of potential customers and generate revenue for nearby merchants. However, due to the dynamics of vehicles, IoV suffers from unstable communication links between vehicles, which reduces the delivery ratio of vehicle advertising. To address this challeng...

To improve the reliability of autonomous vehicles, open-set fault diagnosis is indispensable to jointly detect known and unknown faults, in which unknown faults only appear in the testing set. However, in learning the representations for open-set diagnosis, the extracted representations lack hierarchy to preserve high-level and genuine representati...

In the past couple of decade, mobile communication experiences fast development. Recently, 5G mobile communication has been deployed worldwide, and 5G can reach superior capability and performance. 5G ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (uRLLC) scenario can meet the service high requirements in latency and reliability. Therefore, 5G uRLLC is s...

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising paradigm that exposes Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to road scenarios. In VEC, task offloading can enable vehicles to offload the computing tasks to nearby Roadside Units (RSUs) that deploy computing capabilities. However, the highly dynamic network topology, strict low-delay constraints, and massive data o...

Underwater image processing and analysis have been a hotspot of study in recent years, as more emphasis has been focused to underwater monitoring and usage of marine resources. Compared with the open environment, underwater image encountered with more complicated conditions such as light abortion, scattering, turbulence, nonuniform illumination and...

The emerging Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising technology that has the potential to thwart the energy limitation challenge in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WET-enabled WSNs are known as Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). Over the last decade, various solutions have been sugges...

With the advent of 5G, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), a promising computing paradigm sits closer to users than cloud computing, is being broadly used in various Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and achieve high-quality user experience. Task offloading, as a critical research issue in MEC, is playing an important role in optimizing computational...

Greedy routing efficiently achieves routing solutions for vehicular networks due to its simplicity and reliability. However, the existing greedy routing algorithms have mainly considered simple routing metrics only, e.g., distance based on the local view of an individual vehicle. This consideration is insufficient for analysing dynamic and complica...

With the expansion of intelligent services and applications powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) permeates many aspects of our everyday lives. In order to enable several intelligent IoT applications (i.e., indoor and outdoor), Federated Learning (FL) allows AI training at remote smart devices without the requirement...

The hierarchical structure-based data dissemination is the most popular technique in mobile sink wireless sensor networks (MS-WSNs). An ingenious virtual structure design combined with a precise routing management strategy is significant to attaining efficient data dissemination in hierarchical approaches. This paper proposes a hierarchical protoco...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology to provide computational services to ground terminal devices (TDs) in remote areas or for emergency incidents with its flexibility and mobility. This paper aims to maximize the UAV’s energy efficiency while considering the fairness of offloading. We formula...

Edge caching has emerged as a promising approach to meet explosive mobile data on 6G networks. One critical issue in edge caching is file popularity prediction. The federated learning (FL) based distributed algorithm is used to predict file popularity, which solves user privacy issues in centralized algorithms. However, due to the heterogeneity of...

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) is a promising 6G paradigm for overcoming terrain and surface limitations to provide ubiquitous services worldwide. However, the heterogeneity of the network poses new challenges for SAGIN, particularly in terms of network performance. The space environment is complex and still being explored. Metaverse,...

Recently, sparse arrays have received considerable attention owing to their capability of achieving increased degrees of freedom (DoFs) by exploiting the virtual sensors resulting from their difference or sum-difference coarrays. Mutual coupling is another factor that attracts interest to these kinds of arrays. In this paper, both the fundamental c...

Abstract—Recently, many sparse arrays are proposed to achieve increased uniform degrees of freedom (uDoFs) for the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation of non-circular sources. In light of this recent attention, the high number of uDoFs is the primary motivation for designing those sparse array structures. Although both the number of uDoF and mutu...

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) is an emerging and promising paradigm in 6G for relieving the communication pressure of terrestrial networks while breaking the constraints of terrain and surface to provide additional services for remote and maritime areas. However, within SA-GIN, the network heterogeneity and highly dynamic nature of bo...

Due to the outstanding merits such as mobility, high maneuverability, and flexibility, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are viable mobile power transmitters that can be rapidly deployed in geographically constrained regions. They are good candidates for supplying power to energy-limited Sensor Nodes (SNs) with Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technolog...

Opportunistic routing (OR) is widely adopted in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) running asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocols. In conventional routing, where packets are forwarded along predetermined routes, the sender may wait for the receiver to wake up for a long time. To reduce the sender waiting time, the OR protocols allow nodes to select mu...

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been advancing and gaining tremendous interests from both academia and industry. With the development of wireless technologies, a huge amount of data generated at the network edge provides an unprecedented opportunity to develop GANs applications. However, due to the constraints such as bandwidth, privacy...

With the widespread popularity of the Internet of Things and various intelligent medical devices, the amount of medical data is rising sharply, and thus medical data processing has become increasingly challenging. Mobile edge computing technology allows computing power to be allocated at the edge closer to users, which enables efficient data offloa...

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is a promising technology that can potentially mitigate the energy provisioning problem for sensor networks. In order to efficiently replenish energy for these battery-powered devices, designing appropriate scheduling and charging path planning algorithms is essential and challenging. Whilst previous studies have tackl...

Based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), the Education Maturity Model (EMM) is proposed and the corresponding standards and key issues at each level are analyzed. Under the guidance of EMM, the quality standards of each step in the talent cultivation process are established. The quality assurance system is further built to realize the normaliz...

With the proliferation of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), the complexity of network management has increased. To intelligently manage large-scale networks, we propose a Knowledge-Defined Edge Computing Networks (KDECN) architecture. Edge Nodes (ENs) deployed in the KDECN architecture are responsible for collecting and preprocessi...

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) provides computing, storage, and other fruitful services to end users. Offloading such tasks to cloud servers can help to fulfill the demands of extensive computing resources, but may also lead to network congestion and high latency. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) places the computing nodes near the end users to enable low...

In this paper, flying mobile computing is considered to serve terrestrial Intelligent Internet-of-Things (IIoT) in a dynamic scenario. Existing work mainly trains the trajectory model on board, leading to UAVs' endurance reduction due to excessive energy consumption for training models. And the dynamic change and characteristics of requirements hav...

Educational Process Mining (EPM) is now a promising method to provide decision-support information for the teaching-learning process via finding useful educational guidance from the event logs recorded in the Learning Management System (LMS). Existing studies mainly focus on mining students' problem-solving skills or behavior patterns and interveni...

In vehicular networks, especially in urban scenarios, road topology-based routing shows great advantages in dealing with the problems of broken links and long delays originating from sparse connections and signal attenuation. However, how road status affect data transmission performance on various routing metrics is still an intricate and vague pro...

Recently, energy provisioning problem has become one of the leading research interests in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Deploying Mobile Charger Vehicles (MCVs) (e.g., robots, drones) equipped with high capacity-battery and Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) transmitter to charge the sensor nodes in the network wirelessly, is a promising solution. Ex...

The development of wireless charging technology makes it real to charge the wireless sensor node by a mobile charging vehicle(MCV), which greatly solves the problem of the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. In this paper, a dual-priority scheduling algorithm is proposed(TWOP) to further improve the arrival rate of packets under the premise of...

The recent criteria for designing sparse arrays used in many applications are the number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) and mutual coupling. In this paper, two optimized sparse nested arrays, called OSNA-I and OSNA-II, are proposed for the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation of non-circular signals. The proposed structures aim to enhance the DoFs a...

The software-defined vehicular networking (SDVN) paradigm alleviates the deficiencies brought on by distributed vehicular. The separation of the control plane and the data plane allows the controller to manage the network based on global information. Most existing routing schemes in SDVN obtain the link-state through which vehicles periodically sen...

Recently, low-orbit satellite networks have gained lots of attention from society due to their wide coverage, low transmission latency, and storage and computing capacity. Providing seamless connectivity to users in different areas is envisioned as a promising solution, especially in remote areas and for marine communication. However, when jointly...

The fifth generation (5G) Wireless Communication systems development has brought out a paradigm shift using advanced technologies e.g., softwarization, virtualization, Massive MIMO, ultra-densification and introduction of new frequency bands. However, as the societal needs grow, and to satisfy UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 6G and beyon...

Data transmission in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) often suffers from routing interruptions due to the unstable communication links between vehicles. Over the past decades, many traffic-aware routing protocols have been proposed to alleviate routing interruptions by sensing traffic conditions. However, in most traffic-aware routing protocols,...

Due to the complicated and changing urban traffic conditions and the dynamic mobility of vehicles, the network topology can rapidly change which causes the communication links between vehicles disconnected frequently, and further affects the performance of vehicular networking. To overcome this problem, we propose a intelligent multi-attribute rout...

Smart Parking has gained so much popularity in recent years due to the increasing number of vehicles in big cities, resulting in traffic congestion in urban areas. Not only on the streets but also in places such as educational institutions, hospitals, commercial activities, special events, and entertainment uses. Locating a free parking lot in thes...

We have made research achievements worth sharing on the complicated topic of text-to-image synthesis. Our analysis of popular articles shows that they often use stacked structures to construct and generate confrontation network models and usually introduce multiple sets of generators and discriminator pairs. The entanglement between different gener...

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging multimodal task that requires the ability to recognize visual elements and reason relations in spatial and temporal dimensions according to the given video and question. Most existing GNN-based methods model the visual elements in videos as graph structures and reason relations between them. Altho...

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a computing paradigm that brings Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to the road and vehicular scenarios by providing low-latency and high-efficiency computation services. One key technology of VEC is task offloading, which allows vehicles to send their computation tasks to surrounding Roadside Units (RSUs) for execution,...

Due to the advancements of information technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of distributed sensors and IoT devices in the social IoT (SIoT) systems is proliferating. This has led to various multimedia applications, face recognition and augmented reality (AR). These applications are computation-intensive and delay-sensitive and...

Nature-inspired computing (NIC) has been widely studied for many optimization scenarios. However, miscellaneous solution space of real-world problem causes it is challenging to guarantee the global optimum. Besides, cumbersome structure and complex parameters setting-up make the existed algorithms hard for most users who are not specializing in NIC...

Recent advancements in mobile technology have facilitated location-based social networks. The location-based influence maximization problem, which aims to find top influential seed users for promoting a target location to attract the most individuals, has drawn increasing attention. However, the existing studies largely neglect the importance of us...

Driving safety is one of the most important points to concern on the road. Vehicles constantly generate messages under vehicle-to-everything (V2X) assisted driving. Especially, in dense urban environments, the massive messages carrying precise data can help us to improve road safety. However, vehicles do not always provide accurate data due to a va...

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is inappropriate to use conventional unicast routing due to the broadcast storm problem and spatial diversity of communication links. Opportunistic Routing (OR) benefits the low duty-cycled WSNs by prioritizing the multiple candidates for each node instead of selecting one node as in conventional unicast routi...

In this paper, a new type of coprime-array-based structure, named AtCADiS, is proposed to achieve increased degrees of freedom (DoFs) and reduced mutual coupling. The closed-form expressions for the sensor positions and the number of uniform DoFs (uDoFs) of AtCADiS are provided. Specifically , AtCADiS is constructed via two steps. First, we shift t...

In the scenario of limited energy supply, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enabled communication systems must make efficient use of energy in order to provide long-term service. In this paper, we propose a global energy efficiency maximization (GREEN) strategy for multi-UAV enabled communication systems. In such systems, a group of UAVs communicates...

Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) is an emerging paradigm that employs massive mobile devices (MDs) to complete sensing tasks cooperatively. To provide ubiquitous MCS services, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), featured by high agility and flexibility, becomes increasingly attractive as a powerful assistant for MCS to collect sensing data in hard-to-reach and...