Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Improve Sensor Selection in the Internet of Things

We study the problem of handling timeliness and criticality trade-off when gathering data from multiple resources in complex environments. In IoT environments, where several sensors transmitting data packets - with various criticality and timeliness, the rate of data collection could be limited due to associated costs (e.g., bandwidth limitations and energy considerations). Besides, environment complexity regarding data generation could impose additional challenges to balance criticality and timeliness when gathering data. For instance, when data packets (either regarding criticality or timeliness) of two or more sensors are correlated, or there exists temporal dependency among sensors, incorporating such patterns can expose challenges to trivial policies for data gathering. Motivated by the success of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) approach, we first mapped vanilla A3C into our problem to compare its performance in terms of criticality-weighted deadline miss ratio to the considered baselines in multiple scenarios. We observed degradation of the A3C performance in complex scenarios. Therefore, we modified the A3C network by embedding long short term memory (LSTM) to improve performance in cases that vanilla A3C could not capture repeating patterns in data streams. Simulation results show that the modified A3C reduces the criticality-weighted deadline miss ratio from 0.3 to 0.19.