Liang Zhao

• PhD
• Executive Deputy Dean/Professor (Full) at Shenyang Aerospace University

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...

In 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN), Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) algorithms play a vital role in detecting accidental changes to digital data during transmission. However, due to the massive bandwidth demands in 5G networks, CRC computation is a resource-intensive process. To address this challenge, we propose performing CRC computation and verific...

Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs), or drones, are garnering considerable focus in the realm of wireless communications research because to their notable characteristics, including exceptional mobility, versatile deployment capabilities, and robustness in maintaining line-of-sight (LoS) links. This paper studies a UAV-assisted bidirectional relaying sy...

Self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) protocols guarantee the security of group communications by allowing authorized users to independently recover missed previous session keys from the current broadcast without retransmission. However, existing SGKD protocols have flaws: (1) collusion resistance and revocable nodes are both upper-bounded by...

In modern vehicular networks, the absence of infrastructure support such as Roadside Units (RSUs) presents significant challenges for efficient task offloading and allocation. Limited computational capabilities of individual vehicles, combined with task allocation imbalances caused by varying task complexity and vehicle capacities, further complica...

This paper addresses the challenge of fault analysis in the Vehicular Energy Network (VEN) caused by small fault samples due to transient faults and complex disturbances. The proposed generation and diagnosis networks (GDNs) are developed without necessitating prior knowledge or manual intervention. The approach starts with an encoding and diagnosi...

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a distributed computing paradigm that provides computing capabilities at the periphery of mobile cellular networks. This architecture empowers Mobile Users (MUs) to offload computation-intensive applications to large-scale computing nodes near the edge side, reducing application latency for MUs. The resource allocatio...

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) have the ability to sense the environment. Multiple object tracking (MOT) in AAV video is a very important vision task with a wide variety of applications. However, there are still many challenges in MOT in AAV video. First, the movement of the onboard came...

In large-scale dynamic network environments, optimizing the computation offloading and resource allocation strategy is key to improving resource utilization and meeting the diverse demands of User Equipment (UE). However, traditional strategies for providing personalized computing services face several challenges: dynamic changes in the environment...

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have seen significant growth and functional enhancement in recent years, which integrates various capabilities like communication, navigation, and remote sensing. However, the heterogeneity of data collected by different satellites and the problems of efficient inter-satellite collaborative computation...

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are an important paradigm of intelligent transportation systems. Cooperative perception (CP) and vehicular edge computing (VEC) enhance CAVs’ perception capacity of the region of interest (RoI) while alleviating the pressure of intensive computation on onboard resources. However, existing CP and computation...

Recently, a plethora of promising green energy provisioning technologies has been discussed in the orientation of prolonging the lifetime of energy-limited devices (e.g., sensor nodes). Wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) have emerged among other fields that could greatly benefit from such technologies. Such an ad-hoc network comprises a...

Vehicle trajectory prediction, as a key enabler of the intelligent transportation system, has attracted considerable attention from academia and industry in recent years. However, the variability and dynamism of traffic conditions pose significant challenges to current vehicle trajectory prediction methods, particularly in the form of domain bias....

To enhance the reliability of rotating machinery, cross-domain fault diagnosis becomes vital for detecting faults under unknown operating conditions. However, multi-source domain imbalanced data present significant challenges, as divergent label distributions across domains cause complex domain-class shifts and degrade the performance of cross-doma...

Satellite Edge Computing (SEC) enhances real-time data processing by deploying computational resources at the edge of satellite networks, reducing Task Completion Delay (TCD). To minimize TCD, the characteristics of satellites with large coverage, strong collaborative capabilities, and limited resources must be fully considered. This paper proposes...

Recently, Edge-Cloud Collaborative (ECC) has emerged as an efficient and promising technique to empower various computation-intensive applications in Digital Twin Network (DTN). The integration of ECC and DTN serves to bridge the gap between data analysis and physical states. In ECC, a reliable and optimal task offloading scheme is required to maxi...

Cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) can provide ubiquitous mobile computing and communication services for vehicles, acting as a key technology to realize future urban intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Due to the lack of long-term insight into complex and dynamic urban road states, the existing historical road information-based strategie...

Radio Access Networks (RAN) are anticipated to gradually transition towards Cloud RAN (C-RAN), leveraging the full advantages of the cloud-native computing model. While this paradigm shift offers a promising architectural evolution to improve scalability, efficiency, and performance, significant challenges remain in managing the massive computing r...

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...

The prediction of user trajectories is a fundamental component to support urban traffic management and various advanced transportation applications, such as traffic optimization and location-based services. Trajectory data typically contains multiple behavioral patterns and contexts, including different travel purposes, modes of transportation, tim...

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) aim to enhance traffic management by improving connectivity and data sharing among vehicles and road infrastructure. In a Mixed Connected and Connectionless Vehicles (MCCV) scenario consisting of connected vehicles equipped with On-Board Units (OBUs) and non-connected vehicles lacking OBUs, communication dis...

This work investigates how multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assist the large-scale IoT devices (its count $\geq$ 100) in the edge computing system in accomplishing their tasks. The UAVs serve the latter as edge servers, and fly to footholds to collect task data from the latter, execute tasks locally and return results to the latter. The g...

Digital twins (DT) and mobile networks have evolved forms of intelligence in Internet of Things (IoT). In this work, we consider a Digital Twin Mobile Network (DTMN) scenario with few multimedia samples. Facing challenges of knowledge extraction with few samples, stable interaction with dynamic changes of multimedia data, time and privacy saving in...

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a transportation-specific version of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) designed for vehicular scenarios. Task offloading allows vehicles to send computational tasks to nearby Roadside Units (RSUs) in order to reduce the computation cost for the overall system. However, the state-of-the-art solutions have not fully addres...

With the rapid expansion of Internet of Everything (IoE) devices and the increasing demand for high-speed data and reliable communication services, particularly within 6G cellular networks (CNs), the design of efficient and robust CNs has become a critical research area. Consequently, enabling massive connections, optimizing network resource utiliz...

In the ever-evolving information technology landscape, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a groundbreaking concept that bridges the physical and digital worlds. It is the backbone of an increasingly sophisticated interactive environment, yet it is a subject of intricate security challenges spawned by its multifaceted manifestations. Central to securin...

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have seen significant growth and functional enhancement in recent years, which integrates various capabilities like communication, navigation, and remote sensing. However, the heterogeneity of data collected by different satellites and the problems of efficient inter-satellite collaborative computation...

With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, efficient and accurate object detection capabilities have become crucial factors in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. However, in low-visibility environments such as hazy conditions, the performance of traditional object detection algorithms often degrades...

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...

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...

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...

Empowered by the large amounts of sensor data in the Industrial Internet of Things, data-driven fault diagnosis has a pivotal role in improving equipment reliability in harsh industrial environments. To enhance diagnostic performance under unknown operating conditions, transfer learning-based cross-domain fault diagnosis has been emerging. However,...

Few-shot class-incremental learning is crucial for developing scalable and adaptive intelligent systems, as it enables models to acquire new classes with minimal annotated data while safeguarding the previously accumulated knowledge. Nonetheless, existing methods deal with continuous data streams in a centralized manner, limiting their applicabilit...

The dramatic recent increase of the smart Internet of Everything (IoE) in Industry 4.0 has significantly increased energy consumption, carbon emissions, and global warming. IoE applications in Industry 4.0 face many challenges, including energy efficiency, heterogeneity, security, interoperability, and centralization. Therefore, Industry 4.0 in Bey...

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...

Recently, there has been more interest in Decentralized Data-Sharing (DDS) because of the introduction of Dataspace 4.0. DDS is becoming increasingly popular as a safe, open, and effective way for many parties to data-sharing. Unlike conventional, centralized methods, DDS has several benefits, such as better knowledge exchange, higher accessibility...

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...

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...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communications are critical in regional wireless networks. Using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can significantly improve UAVs’ throughput and energy efficiency. Due to limited communications resources, the data transfer rate of ground terminals (GTs) could be slower, and the throughput may be low....

With the proliferation of mobile applications, the explosion of mobile data traffic imposes a significant burden on backhaul links with limited capacity in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). To alleviate this challenge, content caching based on popularity at Small Base Stations (SBSs) has emerged as a promising solution. However, accurately...

Recently, there has been more interest in Decentralized Data-Sharing (DDS) because of the introduction of Dataspace 4.0. DDS is becoming increasingly popular as a safe, open, and effective way for many parties to data-sharing. Unlike conventional, centralized methods, DDS has several benefits, such as better knowledge exchange, higher accessibility...

The potential of artificial intelligence in transforming education has received considerable attention. This study aims to explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) in assisting students with studying and passing standardized exams while many people think it is hype situation. Using primary education as an example, this research investi...

The emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) ushers in a new era for mobile edge computing (MEC), significantly expanding its range of service and potential applications. Due to the limited storage capacity and energy budget of UAVs, it is crucial to determine a reasonable service caching and task offloading strategy. Service caching means that...

With the development of computing and communication technology, the popularity of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) has promoted the research of advertising among vehicles. The problem of vehicle advertising communication is similar to the problem of Influence Maximization (IM) considered in social networks as both prioritize a set of candidate nodes as...

Recently, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (fixed-wing UAVs) are able to extend the communications mission time and ease of deployment due to their powerful onboard capabilities and flexibility, and reflective intelligent surfaces (RIS) are capable of reflecting links to avoid obstacles and thus improve channel gain. Therefore, RIS-assisted fixe...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been considered a promising technology for advancing terrestrial mobile computing in the dynamic environment. In this research field, throughput, the number of completed tasks and latency are critical evaluation indicators used to measure the efficiency of UAVs in existing studies. In this paper, we transform these...

Vehicle-and-infrastructure cooperation is emerging in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to increase traffic efficiency and road safety with advanced services. Static infrastructures like roadside units (RSUs) have the potential to provide stable and high-quality communication services, but suffer overload problems caused by uneven spatiotem...

As a promising vehicular communication technology, Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) is expected to ensure the safety and convenience of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) by providing global road information. However, it is difficult to obtain global road information in practical scenarios since there will still be many vehicles on the...

This paper reviews three main aspects of authentication protocols of Internet of Things (IoT): classifications and limitations, current trends, and opportunities. First, we explore the significance of IoT authentication protocols in ensuring secure communication and the protection of transmitted and received data, focusing on the classifications an...

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology plays a pivotal role in enabling real-time traffic coordination and safety, warning, and decision support. Within V2X, the Basic Safety Message (BSM) serves as the core to transmit critical vehicle status, location, and intention information to provide a foundation for ensuring reliable traffic safety and coor...

A data publishing deal conducted with anonymous microdata can preserve the privacy of people. However, anonymizing data with multiple records of an individual (1:M dataset) is still a challenging problem. After anonymizing the 1:M microdata, the vertical correlation can be exploited to launch privacy attacks. In this paper, a novel privacy preservi...

Radio Access Networks (RAN) are anticipated to gradually transition towards Cloud RAN (C-RAN), leveraging the full advantages of the cloud-native computing model. While this paradigm shift offers a promising architectural evolution to improve scalability, efficiency, and performance, significant challenges remain in managing the massive computing r...

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is an emerging computing paradigm that serves as a specific application of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in intelligent transportation systems. As a core technology of VEC, task offloading improves computing efficiency and service quality by offloading computing tasks from vehicular devices to edge nodes. However, the h...

The flocking movement is a fundamental and crucial operation in multi-UAVs systems, encompassing navigation and obstacle avoidance. However, traditional flocking algorithms typically rely on rigid rules and exhibit limited adaptability to diverse environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) effectively addresses this issue as a flexible and model-free...

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications technology improves energy efficiency by reflecting signals. This paper utilizes RIS and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize the scheduling of ground terminals (GTs), UAV trajectories, resource allocation, and time slot lengths to maximize sys...

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...