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The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the next wave in networking and communication which will bring by 2020 tens of billions of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices connected through the internet. Hence, this rapid increase in Machine Type Communications (MTC) poses a challenge on cellular operators to support M2M communications without hindering the existing Quality of Service for already established Human-to-Human (H2H) communications. LTE-M is one of the candidates to support M2M communications in Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks. In this paper, we appraise and present an in depth performance evaluation of LTE-M based on cross-layer network metrics. Compared with LTE Category 0 previously released by 3GPP for MTC, simulation results show that LTE-M offers additional advantages to meet M2M communication needs in terms of wider coverage, lower throughput, and a larger number of machines connected through LTE network. However, we show that LTE-M is not yet up to the level to meet future applications requirements regarding a near-zero latency and an advanced Quality of Service (QoS) for this massive number of connected Machine Type devices (MTDs).

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Employing machine learning into 6G vehicular networks to support vehicular application services is being widely studied and a hot topic for the latest research works in the literature. This article provides a comprehensive review of research works that integrated reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning algorithms for vehicular networks management with an emphasis on vehicular telecommunications issues. Vehicular networks have become an important research area due to their specific features and applications such as standardization, efficient traffic management, road safety, and infotainment. In such networks, network entities need to make decisions to maximize network performance under uncertainty. To achieve this goal, Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively solve decision-making problems. However, the state and action spaces are massive and complex in large-scale wireless networks. Hence, RL may not be able to find the best strategy in a reasonable time. Therefore, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been developed to combine RL with Deep Learning (DL) to overcome this issue. In this survey, we first present vehicular networks and give a brief overview of RL and DRL concepts. Then we review RL and especially DRL approaches to address emerging issues in 6G vehicular networks. We finally discuss and highlight some unresolved challenges for further study.

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The growing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), typically referred to as drones, poses new challenges on how to manage their operations in various internet of things (IoT) use cases such as surveillance and monitoring, weather prediction, agriculture, etc. The latter includes a massive number of devices that sometimes produce invalid messages due to lack of energy or system shutdown and needs to be autonomously monitored with drones in rural areas. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based platform for managing drone IoT operations while maintaining trust and security. The test-bed consists of IoT devices, a drone and blockchain-enabled gateways through which drones are controlled to replace malfunctioning devices. The latter are detected using Z-score observation algorithm which launches a smart contract and sends the drone with clear operation order. The results obtained in realistic agriculture use case highlight the utility of our proposition in decreasing signaling and operation time, improving the percentage of successful maintenance operations and providing trust and security when managing drones in an autonomous manner.

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