Reliability Optimization for Channel Resource Allocation in Multihop Wireless Network: A Multigranularity Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Abstract

This article investigates the high-reliable data transmission for multihop and multichannel wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which jointly optimizes the channel allocation and channel access mechanisms. We propose a novel wireless paradigm empowered by mobile-edge computing (MEC) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to improve the data process ability of WSNs and formulate the joint resource allocation problem for reliability maximization as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Meanwhile, we introduce the distributed decision-making (DDM) framework to decouple channel optimization into two subproblems: 1) channel allocation and 2) channel access. Correspondingly, we present an asynchronous channel allocation algorithm for multiagent scenario and enable the neighbor cooperation to tackle the nonstationary problem, which can significantly improve the network convergence speed. Besides, we present a collision-free channel access algorithm including three submodules that can simultaneously eliminate vanishing nodes, hidden terminal, and exposed terminal problems in large-scale WSNs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves network performance in terms of convergence, throughput, collision, and packet delivery ratio (PDR).