Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of managing wireless, energy-harvesting IoT nodes by solving the problem of autonomous management in non-stationary, resource-constrained settings. We show that the state-of-the-art policy-gradient approaches to RL are appropriate for the IoT domain and that they outperform previous approaches. Due to the ability to model continuous observation and action spaces, as well as improved function approximation capability, the new approaches are able to solve harder problems, permitting reward functions that are better aligned with the actual application goals. We show such a reward function and use policy-gradient approaches to learn capable policies, leading to behavior more appropriate for IoT nodes with less manual design effort, increasing the level of autonomy in IoT.
RL has also been used for power allocation in energy-harvesting communication systems. @cite_11 used the SARSA algorithm with linear function approximation to learn a power allocation policy in two-hop communication. The objective of their policy is to maximize throughput of a communication system, but they designed a reward function based on the total power assigned to transmissions, which they claimed was correlated. They simulated a communication environment and approximated the state space with discrete features that indicate battery level and its constraints, harvested energy over an hour, characteristics of the communication link, data arrival process, and the data buffers at the communicating nodes. Similarly, @cite_13 , used an actor-critic method with linear function approximation to learn approximation for both policy and value function. They used a Gaussian policy to generate continuous values of bounded packet rates and summarized the state space by continuous values of the current residual energy. The objective is to maximize transmitted packet rate while sustaining perpetual operation; hence they designed a reward function to be a multiplication of normalized residual energy and the packet rate.
@cite_13 @cite_11
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Wireless systems comprised of rechargeable nodes have a significantly prolonged lifetime and are sustainable. A distinct characteristic of these systems is the fact that the nodes can harvest energy throughout the duration in which communication takes place. As such, transmission policies of the nodes need to adapt to these harvested energy arrivals. In this paper, we consider optimization of point-to-point data transmission with an energy harvesting transmitter which has a limited battery capacity, communicating in a wireless fading channel. We consider two objectives: maximizing the throughput by a deadline, and minimizing the transmission completion time of the communication session. We optimize these objectives by controlling the time sequence of transmit powers subject to energy storage capacity and causality constraints. We, first, study optimal offline policies. We introduce a directional water-filling algorithm which provides a simple and concise interpretation of the necessary optimality conditions. We show the optimality of an adaptive directional water-filling algorithm for the throughput maximization problem. We solve the transmission completion time minimization problem by utilizing its equivalence to its throughput maximization counterpart. Next, we consider online policies. We use stochastic dynamic programming to solve for the optimal online policy that maximizes the average number of bits delivered by a deadline under stochastic fading and energy arrival processes with causal channel state feedback. We also propose near-optimal policies with reduced complexity, and numerically study their performances along with the performances of the offline and online optimal policies under various different configurations. Energy harvesting (EH) two-hop communications are considered. The transmitter and the relay harvest energy from the environment and use it exclusively for transmitting data. A data arrival process is assumed at the transmitter. At the relay, a finite data buffer is used to store the received data. We consider a realistic scenario in which the EH nodes have only local causal knowledge, i.e., at any time instant, each EH node only knows the current value of its EH process, channel state, and data arrival process. Our goal is to find a power allocation policy to maximize the throughput at the receiver. We show that because the EH nodes have local causal knowledge, the two-hop communication problem can be separated into two point-to-point problems. Consequently, independent power allocation problems are solved at each EH node. To find the power allocation policy, reinforcement learning with linear function approximation is applied. Moreover, to perform function approximation two feature functions which consider the data arrival process are introduced. Numerical results show that the proposed approach has only a small degradation as compared to the offline optimum case. Furthermore, we show that with the use of the proposed feature functions a better performance is achieved compared to standard approximation techniques. We consider the minimization of the transmission completion time with a battery limited energy harvesting transmitter in an M-user AWGN broadcast channel where the transmitter is able to harvest energy from the nature, using a finite storage capacity rechargeable battery. The harvested energy is modeled to arrive (be harvested) at the transmitter during the course of transmissions at arbitrary time instants. The transmitter has fixed number of packets for each receiver. Due to the finite battery capacity, energy may overflow without being utilized for data transmission. We derive the optimal offline transmission policy that minimizes the time by which all of the data packets are delivered to their respective destinations. We analyze the structural properties of the optimal transmission policy using a dual problem. We find the optimal total transmit power sequence by a directional water-filling algorithm. We prove that there exist M-1 cut-off power levels such that user i is allocated the power between the i-1st and the ith cut-off power levels subject to the availability of the allocated total power level. Based on these properties, we propose an algorithm that gives the globally optimal offline policy. The proposed algorithm uses directional water-filling repetitively. Finally, we illustrate the optimal policy and compare its performance with several suboptimal policies under different settings. We consider the problem of power allocation over one or more time-varying channels with unknown distributions in energy harvesting communications. In the single-channel case, the transmitter chooses the transmit power based on the amount of stored energy in its battery with the goal of maximizing the average rate over time. We model this problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with transmitter as the agent, battery status as the state, transmits power as the action and rate as the reward. The average reward maximization problem can be modeled by a linear program (LP) that uses the transition probabilities for the state-action pairs and their reward values to select a power allocation policy. This problem is challenging because the uncertainty in channels implies that the mean rewards associated with the state-action pairs are unknown. We therefore propose two online learning algorithms: linear program of sample means (LPSM) and Epoch-LPSM that learn these rewards and adapt their policies over time. For both algorithms, we prove that their regret is upper-bounded by a constant. To our knowledge this is the first result showing constant regret learning algorithms for MDPs with unknown mean rewards. We also prove an even stronger result about LPSM: that its policy matches the optimal policy exactly in finite expected time. Epoch-LPSM incurs a higher regret compared with the LPSM, while reducing the computational requirements substantially. We further consider a multi-channel scenario, where the agent also chooses a channel in each slot, and present our multi-channel LPSM (MC-LPSM) algorithm that explores different channels and uses that information to solve the LP during exploitation. MC-LPSM incurs a regret that scales logarithmically in time and linearly in the number of channels. Through a matching lower bound on the regret of any algorithm, we also prove the asymptotic order optimality of MC-LPSM.