Onel Luis Alcaraz López

Prasoon Raghuwanshi, Onel Luis Alcaraz López, I-Hong Hou et al.

Goal-oriented communication (GoC) is a form of semantic communication where the effectiveness of information transmission is measured by its impact on achieving the desired goal. In Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, GoC can enable sensors to selectively transmit data relevant to intended goals of the receiver, thereby facilitating timely decision-making, reducing network congestion, and enhancing spectral efficiency. In this paper, we consider an IoT scenario where an edge node polls sensors monitoring the state of a non-linear dynamic system (NLDS) to respond to the queries of several clients. This work delves into the foregoing GoC problem and solution, which we termed goal-oriented scheduling (GoS). The latter utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with meticulously devised action space, state space, and reward function. A long short-term memory network is used to estimate the inter-query duration and the corresponding estimation standard deviation. This empowers the proposed DRL scheduler to make judicious decisions, even when no queries are posed, which would later lead to the minimization of the mean square error (MSE) of the query responses. Numerical analysis demonstrates that the proposed GoS obtains a smaller MSE compared to the benchmark scheduling methods while being of lower complexity. Moreover, this is attained without polling sensors during 77%-88% of the testing phase, thus, resulting beneficial in terms of energy efficiency.

Prasoon Raghuwanshi, Onel Luis Alcaraz López, Neelesh B. Mehta et al.

Efficient Random Access (RA) is critical for enabling reliable communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Herein, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based distributed RA scheme, entitled Neural Network-Based Bandit (NNBB), for the IIoT alarm scenario. In such a scenario, the devices may detect a common critical event, and the goal is to ensure the alarm information is delivered successfully from at least one device. The proposed NNBB scheme is implemented at each device, where it trains itself online and establishes implicit inter-device coordination to achieve the common goal. Devices can transmit simultaneously on multiple orthogonal channels and each possible transmission pattern constitutes a possible action for the NNBB, which uses a deep neural network to determine the action. Our simulation results show that as the number of devices in the network increases, so does the performance gain of the NNBB compared to the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) RA benchmark. For instance, NNBB experiences a 7% success rate drop when there are four channels and the number of devices increases from 10 to 60, while MAB faces a 25% drop.