Q-greedyUCB: a New Exploration Policy for Adaptive and Resource-efficient Scheduling

This paper proposes a learning algorithm to find a scheduling policy that achieves an optimal delay-power trade-off in communication systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to minimize the expected latency for a given energy constraint where the environments such as traffic arrival rates or channel conditions can change over time. For this purpose, this problem is formulated as an infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) with constraints. To handle the constrained optimization problem, we adopt the Lagrangian relaxation technique to solve it. Then, we propose a variant of Q-learning, Q-greedyUCB that combines Q-learning for \emph{average} reward algorithm and Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) policy to solve this decision-making problem. We prove that the Q-greedyUCB algorithm is convergent through mathematical analysis. Simulation results show that Q-greedyUCB finds an optimal scheduling strategy, and is more efficient than Q-learning with the $\varepsilon$-greedy and Average-payoff RL algorithm in terms of the cumulative reward (i.e., the weighted sum of delay and energy) and the convergence speed. We also show that our algorithm can reduce the regret by up to 12% compared to the Q-learning with the $\varepsilon$-greedy and Average-payoff RL algorithm

Adaptive Power and Rate Control for Real-time Status Updating over Fading Channels

Age of Information (AoI) has attracted much attention recently due to its capability of characterizing the freshness of information. To improve information freshness over fading channels, efficient scheduling methods are highly desired for wireless transmissions. However, due to the channel instability and arrival randomness, optimizing AoI is very challenging. In this paper, we are interested in the AoI-optimal transmissions with rate-adaptive transmission schemes in a buffer-aware system. More specifically, we utilize a probabilistic scheduling method to minimize the AoI while satisfying an average power constraint. By characterizing the probabilistic scheduling policy with a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), we formulate a Linear Programming (LP) problem. Further, a low complexity algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal scheduling policy, which is proved to belong to a set of semi-threshold-based policies. Numerical results verify the reduction in computational complexity and the optimality of semi-threshold-based policy, which indicates that we can achieve well real-time service with a low calculating complexity.Comment: Journal versio

Delay-Optimal and Energy-Efficient Communications with Markovian Arrivals

In this paper, delay-optimal and energy-efficient communication is studied for a single link under Markov random arrivals. We present the optimal tradeoff between delay and power over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels and extend the optimal tradeoff for block fading channels. Under time-correlated traffic arrivals, we develop a cross-layer solution that jointly considers the arrival rate, the queue length, and the channel state in order to minimize the average delay subject to a power constraint. For this purpose, we formulate the average delay and power problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). Based on steady-state analysis for the CMDP, a Linear Programming (LP) problem is formulated to obtain the optimal delay-power tradeoff. We further show the optimal transmission strategy using a Lagrangian relaxation technique. Specifically, the optimal adaptive transmission is shown to have a threshold type of structure, where the thresholds on the queue length are presented for different transmission rates under the given arrival rates and channel states. By exploiting the result, we develop a threshold-based algorithm to efficiently obtain the optimal delay-power tradeoff. We show how a trajectory-sampling version of the proposed algorithm can be developed without the prior need of arrival statistics