Energy-aware task scheduling in wireless sensor networks based on cooperative reinforcement learning

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are an attractive platform for cyber physical systems. A typical WSN application is composed of different tasks which need to be scheduled on each sensor node. However, the severe energy limitations pose a particular challenge for developing WSN applications, and the scheduling of tasks has typically a strong influence on the achievable performance and energy consumption. In this paper we propose a method for scheduling the tasks using cooperative reinforcement learning (RL) where each node determines the next task based on the observed application behavior. In this RL framework we can trade the application performance and the required energy consumption by a weighted reward function and can therefore achieve different energy/performance results of the overall application. By exchanging data among neighboring nodes we can further improve this energy/performance trade-off. We evaluate our approach in an target tracking application. Our simulations show that cooperative approaches are superior to non-cooperative approaches for this kind of applications.