Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Game Theoretic Solution for Power Management in IoT-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

[EN] Internet of things (IoT) is a very important research area, having many applications such as smart cities, intelligent transportation system, tracing, and smart homes. The underlying technology for IoT are wireless sensor networks (WSN). The selection of cluster head (CH) is significant as a part of the WSN's optimization in the context of energy consumption. In WSNs, the nodes operate on a very limited energy source, therefore, the routing protocols designed must meet the optimal utilization of energy consumption in such networks. Evolutionary games can be designed to meet this aspect by providing an adequately efficient CH selection mechanism. In such types of mechanisms, the network nodes are considered intelligent and independent to select their own strategies. However, the existing mechanisms do not consider a combination of many possible parameters associated with the smart nodes in WSNs, such as remaining energy, selfishness, hop-level, density, and degree of connectivity. In our work, we designed an evolutionary game-based approach for CH selection, combined with some vital parameters associated with sensor nodes and the entire networks. The nodes are assumed to be smart, therefore, the aspect of being selfish is also addressed in this work. The simulation results indicate that our work performs much better than typical evolutionary game-based approachesThe authors acknowledge the support of the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund 2019 for this work.Sohail, M.; Khan, S.; Ahmad, R.; Singh, D.; Lloret, J. (2019). Game Theoretic Solution for Power Management in IoT-Based Wireless Sensor Networks. Sensors. 19(18):1-20. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183835120191