RLBEEP: Reinforcement-Learning-Based Energy Efficient Control and Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important topics in the field of wireless sensor networks is the development of approaches to improve network lifetime. In this paper, an energy-efficient control and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is presented. This algorithm is based on reinforcement learning for energy management in the network. This protocol seeks to optimize routing policies to maximize the long-term reward received by each node, using reinforcement learning, which is a machine learning approach. In order to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor network, three energy management approaches have been proposed. The first approach is to navigate correctly using reinforcement learning to reduce the length of the routes and to improve energy consumption. The second approach is to exploit a sleep scheduling technique to improve node energy consumption. The last approach is used to restrict data transmission of each node based on the received data change rate. Simulation results show that in terms of network lifespan, the proposed method significantly outperforms previous reported methods.