Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technique to fulfill the long-term and self-sustainable operations for Internet of things (IoT) systems. In this paper, we study the joint access control and battery prediction problems in a small-cell IoT system including multiple EH user equipments (UEs) and one base station (BS) with limited uplink access channels. Each UE has a rechargeable battery with finite capacity. The system control is modeled as a Markov decision process without complete prior knowledge assumed at the BS, which also deals with large sizes in both state and action spaces. First, to handle the access control problem assuming causal battery and channel state information, we propose a scheduling algorithm that maximizes the uplink transmission sum rate based on reinforcement learning (RL) with deep Q-network (DQN) enhancement. Second, for the battery prediction problem, with a fixed round-robin access control policy adopted, we develop a RL based algorithm to minimize the prediction loss (error) without any model knowledge about the energy source and energy arrival process. Finally, the joint access control and battery prediction problem is investigated, where we propose a two-layer RL network to simultaneously deal with maximizing the sum rate and minimizing the prediction loss: the first layer is for battery prediction, the second layer generates the access policy based on the output from the first layer. Experiment results show that the three proposed RL algorithms can achieve better performances compared with existing benchmarks.
The second class comprises online approaches @cite_30 @cite_26 @cite_20 . Authors in @cite_30 studied a multi-access wireless system with EH transmitters, and the access problem was modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). @cite_26 , the optimal power control policies for EH nodes in a multi-access system was considered, where a dam model was constructed to capture the dynamics of the EH process. In these approaches, some statistic knowledge regarding the dynamic system should be known at the transmitters @cite_20 . In many practical applications, the complete non-casual knowledge or even statistical knowledge of the system dynamics (including both the channel and energy parts) might not be available, especially when the EH processes are non-stationary or from sources with unknown distributions. For example, in a wireless network with solar EH nodes distributed randomly over a geographical area, the characteristics of the harvested energy at each node depend on the node location, and change over time in a non-stationary fashion @cite_15 . In such cases, the priori knowledge about dynamics of energy sources is very difficult to obtain.
@cite_30 @cite_15 @cite_26 @cite_20
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A multi-access wireless network with N transmitting nodes, each equipped with an energy harvesting (EH) device and a rechargeable battery of finite capacity, is studied. At each time slot (TS) a node is operative with a certain probability, which may depend on the availability of data, or the state of its channel. The energy arrival process at each node is modelled as an independent two-state Markov process, such that, at each TS, a node either harvests one unit of energy, or none. At each TS a subset of the nodes is scheduled by the access point (AP) . The scheduling policy that maximises the total throughput is studied assuming that the AP does not know the states of either the EH processes or the batteries. The problem is identified as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, and an upper bound on the optimal scheduling policy is found. Under certain assumptions regarding the EH processes and the battery sizes, the optimality of the myopic policy (MP) is proven. For the general case, the performance of MP is compared numerically to the upper bound. A time-slotted multiple access wireless system with N transmitting nodes, each equipped with an energy harvesting (EH) device and a rechargeable battery of finite capacity, is studied. The energy arrival process at each node is modeled as an independent two-state Markov process, such that a node either harvests one unit of energy, or none, at each time slot (TS). The access point (AP) schedules a subset of K nodes to transmit over K orthogonal channels at each TS. The maximum total throughput is studied for a backlogged system without the knowledge of the EH processes and nodes' battery states at the AP. The problem is identified as a partially observable Markov decision process, and the optimal policy for the general model is studied numerically. Under certain assumptions regarding the EH processes and the battery sizes, the optimal scheduling policy is characterized explicitly, and is shown to be myopic. 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. This paper addresses the problem of finding outage- optimal power control policies for wireless energy harvesting sensor (EHS) nodes with automatic repeat request (ARQ)-based packet transmissions. The power control policy of the EHS specifies the transmission power for each packet transmission attempt, based on all the information available at the EHS. In particular, the acknowledgement (ACK) or negative acknowledgement (NACK) messages received provide the EHS with partial information about the channel state. We solve the problem of finding an optimal power control policy by casting it as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We study the structure of the optimal power policy in two ways. First, for the special case of binary power levels at the EHS, we show that the optimal policy for the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) when the channel state is observable is a threshold policy in the battery state. Second, we benchmark the performance of the EHS by rigorously analyzing the outage probability of a general fixed-power transmission scheme, where the EHS uses a predetermined power level at each slot within the frame. Monte Carlo simulation results illustrate the performance of the POMDP approach and verify the accuracy of the analysis. They also show that the POMDP solutions can significantly outperform conventional ad hoc approaches.