A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Improving Age of Information in Mission-Critical IoT

The emerging mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) play a vital role in remote healthcare, haptic interaction, and industrial automation, where timely delivery of status updates is crucial. The Age of Information (AoI) is an effective metric to capture and evaluate information freshness at the destination. A system design based solely on the optimization of the average AoI might not be adequate to capture the requirements of mission-critical applications, since averaging eliminates the effects of extreme events. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based algorithm to improve AoI in mission-critical IoT applications. The objective is to minimize an AoI-based metric consisting of the weighted sum of the average AoI and the probability of exceeding an AoI threshold. We utilize the actor-critic method to train the algorithm to achieve optimized scheduling policy to solve the formulated problem. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated in a simulated setup and the results show a significant improvement in terms of the average AoI and the AoI violation probability compared to the related-work.

Timely and Efficient Information Delivery in Real-Time Industrial IoT Networks

Enabling real-time communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks is crucial to support autonomous, self-organized and re-configurable industrial automation for Industry 4.0 and the forthcoming Industry 5.0. In this paper, we consider a SIC-assisted real-time IIoT network, in which sensor nodes generate reports according to an event-generation probability that is specific for the monitored phenomena. The reports are delivered over a block-fading channel to a common Access Point (AP) in slotted ALOHA fashion, which leverages the imbalances in the received powers among the contending users and applies successive interference cancellation (SIC) to decode user packets from the collisions. We provide an extensive analytical treatment of the setup, deriving the Age of Information (AoI), throughput and deadline violation probability, when the AP has access to both the perfect as well as the imperfect channel-state information. We show that adopting SIC improves all the performance parameters with respect to the standard slotted ALOHA, as well as to an age-dependent access method. The analytical results agree with the simulation based ones, demonstrating that investing in the SIC capability at the receiver enables this simple access method to support timely and efficient information delivery in IIoT networks.

AA-DL: AoI-Aware Deep Learning Approach for D2D-Assisted Industrial IoT

In real-time Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), e.g., monitoring and control scenarios, the freshness of data is crucial to maintain the system functionality and stability. In this paper, we propose an AoI-Aware Deep Learning (AA-DL) approach to minimize the Peak Age of Information (PAoI) in D2D-assisted IIoT networks. Particularly, we analyzed the success probability and the average PAoI via stochastic geometry, and formulate an optimization problem with the objective to find the optimal scheduling policy that minimizes PAoI. In order to solve the non-convex scheduling problem, we develop a Neural Network (NN) structure that exploits the Geographic Location Information (GLI) along with feedback stages to perform unsupervised learning over randomly deployed networks. Our motivation is based on the observation that in various transmission contexts, the wireless channel intensity is mainly influenced by distancedependant path loss, which could be calculated using the GLI of each link. The performance of the AA-DL method is evaluated via numerical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method to improve the PAoI performance compared to a recent benchmark while maintains lower complexity against the conventional iterative optimization method.