Modal-Aware Resource Allocation for Cross-Modal Collaborative Communication in IIoT

With the development of human–machine interactions, users are increasingly evolving toward an immersion experience with multidimensional stimuli. Facing this trend, cross-modal collaborative communication is considered an effective technology in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In this article, we focus on open issues about resource reuse, pair interactivity, and user assurance in cross-modal collaborative communication to improve Quality of Service (QoS) and users’ satisfaction. Therefore, we propose a novel architecture of modal-aware resource allocation to solve these contradictions. First, taking all the characteristics of multimodal into account, we introduce network slices to visualize resource allocation, which is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Second, we decompose the problem by the transformation of probabilistic constraint and Lyapunov Optimization. Third, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) decentralized method in the dynamic environment. Meanwhile, a federated DRL framework is provided to overcome the training limitations of local DRL models. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our proposed method performs better than other decentralized methods and achieves superiority in cross-modal collaborative communications.