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

Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances

This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and Wireless Energy Transfer

Joint Bandwidth and Power Allocation with Admission Control in Wireless Multi-User Networks With and Without Relaying

Equal allocation of bandwidth and/or power may not be efficient for wireless multi-user networks with limited bandwidth and power resources. Joint bandwidth and power allocation strategies for wireless multi-user networks with and without relaying are proposed in this paper for (i) the maximization of the sum capacity of all users; (ii) the maximization of the worst user capacity; and (iii) the minimization of the total power consumption of all users. It is shown that the proposed allocation problems are convex and, therefore, can be solved efficiently. Moreover, the admission control based joint bandwidth and power allocation is considered. A suboptimal greedy search algorithm is developed to solve the admission control problem efficiently. The conditions under which the greedy search is optimal are derived and shown to be mild. The performance improvements offered by the proposed joint bandwidth and power allocation are demonstrated by simulations. The advantages of the suboptimal greedy search algorithm for admission control are also shown.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. Signal Processing in June 201