5,233 research outputs found
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Sensor Scheduling in Cyber-Physical Systems
In many Cyber-Physical Systems, we encounter the problem of remote state
estimation of geographically distributed and remote physical processes. This
paper studies the scheduling of sensor transmissions to estimate the states of
multiple remote, dynamic processes. Information from the different sensors have
to be transmitted to a central gateway over a wireless network for monitoring
purposes, where typically fewer wireless channels are available than there are
processes to be monitored. For effective estimation at the gateway, the sensors
need to be scheduled appropriately, i.e., at each time instant one needs to
decide which sensors have network access and which ones do not. To address this
scheduling problem, we formulate an associated Markov decision process (MDP).
This MDP is then solved using a Deep Q-Network, a recent deep reinforcement
learning algorithm that is at once scalable and model-free. We compare our
scheduling algorithm to popular scheduling algorithms such as round-robin and
reduced-waiting-time, among others. Our algorithm is shown to significantly
outperform these algorithms for many example scenarios
Optimal Energy Allocation for Kalman Filtering over Packet Dropping Links with Imperfect Acknowledgments and Energy Harvesting Constraints
This paper presents a design methodology for optimal transmission energy
allocation at a sensor equipped with energy harvesting technology for remote
state estimation of linear stochastic dynamical systems. In this framework, the
sensor measurements as noisy versions of the system states are sent to the
receiver over a packet dropping communication channel. The packet dropout
probabilities of the channel depend on both the sensor's transmission energies
and time varying wireless fading channel gains. The sensor has access to an
energy harvesting source which is an everlasting but unreliable energy source
compared to conventional batteries with fixed energy storages. The receiver
performs optimal state estimation with random packet dropouts to minimize the
estimation error covariances based on received measurements. The receiver also
sends packet receipt acknowledgments to the sensor via an erroneous feedback
communication channel which is itself packet dropping.
The objective is to design optimal transmission energy allocation at the
energy harvesting sensor to minimize either a finite-time horizon sum or a long
term average (infinite-time horizon) of the trace of the expected estimation
error covariance of the receiver's Kalman filter. These problems are formulated
as Markov decision processes with imperfect state information. The optimal
transmission energy allocation policies are obtained by the use of dynamic
programming techniques. Using the concept of submodularity, the structure of
the optimal transmission energy policies are studied. Suboptimal solutions are
also discussed which are far less computationally intensive than optimal
solutions. Numerical simulation results are presented illustrating the
performance of the energy allocation algorithms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. arXiv admin
note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.663
An Optimal Transmission Strategy for Kalman Filtering over Packet Dropping Links with Imperfect Acknowledgements
This paper presents a novel design methodology for optimal transmission
policies at a smart sensor to remotely estimate the state of a stable linear
stochastic dynamical system. The sensor makes measurements of the process and
forms estimates of the state using a local Kalman filter. The sensor transmits
quantized information over a packet dropping link to the remote receiver. The
receiver sends packet receipt acknowledgments back to the sensor via an
erroneous feedback communication channel which is itself packet dropping. The
key novelty of this formulation is that the smart sensor decides, at each
discrete time instant, whether to transmit a quantized version of either its
local state estimate or its local innovation. The objective is to design
optimal transmission policies in order to minimize a long term average cost
function as a convex combination of the receiver's expected estimation error
covariance and the energy needed to transmit the packets. The optimal
transmission policy is obtained by the use of dynamic programming techniques.
Using the concept of submodularity, the optimality of a threshold policy in the
case of scalar systems with perfect packet receipt acknowledgments is proved.
Suboptimal solutions and their structural results are also discussed. Numerical
results are presented illustrating the performance of the optimal and
suboptimal transmission policies.Comment: Conditionally accepted in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network
System
Proactive Caching for Energy-Efficiency in Wireless Networks: A Markov Decision Process Approach
Content caching in wireless networks provides a substantial opportunity to
trade off low cost memory storage with energy consumption, yet finding the
optimal causal policy with low computational complexity remains a challenge.
This paper models the Joint Pushing and Caching (JPC) problem as a Markov
Decision Process (MDP) and provides a solution to determine the optimal
randomized policy. A novel approach to decouple the influence from buffer
occupancy and user requests is proposed to turn the high-dimensional
optimization problem into three low-dimensional ones. Furthermore, a
non-iterative algorithm to solve one of the sub-problems is presented,
exploiting a structural property we found as \textit{generalized monotonicity},
and hence significantly reduces the computational complexity. The result
attains close performance in comparison with theoretical bounds from
non-practical policies, while benefiting from higher time efficiency than the
unadapted MDP solution.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE International Conference on
Communications 201
Computation-Communication Trade-offs and Sensor Selection in Real-time Estimation for Processing Networks
Recent advances in electronics are enabling substantial processing to be
performed at each node (robots, sensors) of a networked system. Local
processing enables data compression and may mitigate measurement noise, but it
is still slower compared to a central computer (it entails a larger
computational delay). However, while nodes can process the data in parallel,
the centralized computational is sequential in nature. On the other hand, if a
node sends raw data to a central computer for processing, it incurs
communication delay. This leads to a fundamental communication-computation
trade-off, where each node has to decide on the optimal amount of preprocessing
in order to maximize the network performance. We consider a network in charge
of estimating the state of a dynamical system and provide three contributions.
First, we provide a rigorous problem formulation for optimal real-time
estimation in processing networks in the presence of delays. Second, we show
that, in the case of a homogeneous network (where all sensors have the same
computation) that monitors a continuous-time scalar linear system, the optimal
amount of local preprocessing maximizing the network estimation performance can
be computed analytically. Third, we consider the realistic case of a
heterogeneous network monitoring a discrete-time multi-variate linear system
and provide algorithms to decide on suitable preprocessing at each node, and to
select a sensor subset when computational constraints make using all sensors
suboptimal. Numerical simulations show that selecting the sensors is crucial.
Moreover, we show that if the nodes apply the preprocessing policy suggested by
our algorithms, they can largely improve the network estimation performance.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures. Accepted journal versio
Optimal Sensor Collaboration for Parameter Tracking Using Energy Harvesting Sensors
In this paper, we design an optimal sensor collaboration strategy among
neighboring nodes while tracking a time-varying parameter using wireless sensor
networks in the presence of imperfect communication channels. The sensor
network is assumed to be self-powered, where sensors are equipped with energy
harvesters that replenish energy from the environment. In order to minimize the
mean square estimation error of parameter tracking, we propose an online sensor
collaboration policy subject to real-time energy harvesting constraints. The
proposed energy allocation strategy is computationally light and only relies on
the second-order statistics of the system parameters. For this, we first
consider an offline non-convex optimization problem, which is solved exactly
using semidefinite programming. Based on the offline solution, we design an
online power allocation policy that requires minimal online computation and
satisfies the dynamics of energy flow at each sensor. We prove that the
proposed online policy is asymptotically equivalent to the optimal offline
solution and show its convergence rate and robustness. We empirically show that
the estimation performance of the proposed online scheme is better than that of
the online scheme when channel state information about the dynamical system is
available in the low SNR regime. Numerical results are conducted to demonstrate
the effectiveness of our approach
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