iot system engineers

Abstract: Edge-centric IoT systems are increasingly evaluated through sensor values or platform features, yet the telemetry pipeline itself, the sequence of sensing, serialization, message mediation, ingestion, and persistence, is rarely released as a measurable object. This limits reproducible benchmarking of timeliness, provenance, and operational cost, especially in early-stage IoT design where real deployments and high-quality open data are often unavailable. I present a measurement-first edge IoT testbed and dataset that elevate timeliness, provenance, and energy to first-class telemetry dimensions. The testbed operationalizes a role-based event-driven architecture with explicit Source-Broker-Aggregator responsibilities and a schema-governed TelemetryMessage envelope (Avro) that embeds correlation identifiers and a uniform, cross-role vocabulary of stage-level timestamps. To trace mediation effects, I extend an MQTT broker (Eclipse Mosquitto) with a plugin that annotates messages with high-precision ingress/egress timestamps. I release the dataset in a dual representation: (i) replayable raw events as compressed Avro streams and (ii) analysis-ready long-format Parquet tables partitioned for efficient query and benchmarking, generated by a deterministic raw-to-tabular transformation pipeline. The contribution is an integrated engineering artifact and dataset built from established components. The demonstration describes one deployment through latency summaries, measurement-context distributions, and energy aggregates; it does not establish a new attribution method or a controlled performance benchmark. By co-releasing heterogeneous telemetry with pipeline timing and energy signals in both replayable and queryable forms, the artifact provides a basis for reproducible exploratory analysis and subsequent benchmarking studies.

Abstract: Federated continual learning (FCL) has attracted considerable interest by enabling local clients to continually acquire knowledge from new tasks. However, most FCL methods assume that the global server has prior knowledge of the arrival times and number of categories for new tasks, which is unrealistic in the real world. Furthermore, they neglect the importance of positive inter-task semantic relationships when learning new tasks and are significantly affected by irrelevant relationships from old tasks, thereby exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Task Relevance-driven Prompt Expansion (TRPE) model. Specifically, to eliminate the reliance on prior knowledge of new tasks, we propose an out-of-distribution detector to identify the arrival of new tasks within local clients, along with a radius-adaptive DBSCAN to infer the quantity of categories in new tasks on the proxy server. Moreover, to explore positive inter-task relationships, we calculate the affinity between the original gradient for learning new task and its gradient orthogonal to the feature space of old tasks to evaluate semantic relevance between old and new tasks from a global perspective. Then, we use this global task relevance to determine the key-prompt pair for new tasks and identify highly related old tasks. After concatenating their prompts for training, we can leverage such positive inter-task relations to improve the continual learning of newly arriving tasks. To balance the learning of new tasks and the forgetting of old ones, a soft orthogonality constraint is applied to the local key and prompt gradients. Experiments spanning diverse datasets and backbones confirm the efficacy of our TRPE model.

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning supports cooperative decision-making in Internet of Things systems, but strategic deviations can disrupt coordination and undermine confidence in the training process. This paper proposes Blockchain-Enabled Centralized Training and Decentralized Execution (BE-CTDE), which uses blockchain as an active training-management layer. A behavioral verifier compares executed trajectories with shared-policy recommendations; its flags drive a token mechanism combining slashing, burning, rewards, and compensation. Retained balances determine each agent's contribution to the global policy update, connecting auditable behavior to learning influence. We derive a one-round incentive condition that accounts for action-dependent compensation and the payoff from deviation, and a finite expected exclusion-time bound under explicit conditional detection and accounting assumptions, showing perfect detection is unnecessary. An exact finite-population capacity bound characterizes the limits of the population-relative detector. In multi-agent path finding experiments, BE-CTDE outperforms a state-of-the-art learning-based path planner with substantially higher success rates under attack, even when adversaries form the majority. It also outperforms partially defended baselines in all configurations, with collision rates up to 35% lower than under detection without economic consequences and up to 43% lower than under conventional stake slashing. Together, these results characterize how behavioral verification and token feedback can support accountable cooperative learning.

Abstract: Collecting relevant data from Internet of Things devices under freshness and energy constraints is a key challenge in 6G edge networks. A lightweight neural network on the device filters irrelevant observations, but storing it in dynamic random access memory consumes refresh energy during standby. This letter proposes a pull-based framework where an edge server remotely activates and approximates memory and jointly selects the activation timing, refresh period, model size, and transmission threshold. We derive the expected freshness and energy over erasure channels in closed form and show that the scheme consumes less energy than an always-on baseline under the same freshness constraint.

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of complex models across large-scale networks of edge devices while keeping data localized. However, data heterogeneity and high communication overhead remain fundamental bottlenecks. Recently, the spectral optimizer Muon has demonstrated remarkable advantages over Adam-like methods in centralized training. While recent efforts have attempted to transition Muon to FL, naive integrations into traditional architectures fail short. Crucially, existing approaches do not support the the communication compression and local steps --- the two foundational techniques of efficient FL. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel spectral FL method that utilizes both local updates and compression. We establish rigorous convergence guarantees under mild assumptions, notably eliminating the restrictive bounded heterogeneity condition. Empirical evaluation on standard image classification benchmarks validates the efficiency and robustness of our approach.