Intelligent Channel Allocation for Age of Information Optimization in Internet of Medical Things

Along with the development of realtime applications, the freshness of information becomes significant because the overdue information is worthless and useless and even harmful to the right judgement of system. Therefore, The Age of Information (AoI) used for marking the freshness of information is proposed. In Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which is derived from the requirement of Internet of Thins (IoT) in medicine, high freshness of medical information should be guaranteed. In this paper, we introduce the AoI of medical information when allocating channels for users in IoMT. Due to the advantages of Deep Q-learning Network (DQN) applied in resource management in wireless network, we propose a novel DQN-based Channel Allocation (DQCA) algorithm to provide the strategy for channel allocation under the optimization of the system cost considering the AoI and energy consumption of coordinator nodes. Unlike the traditional centralized channel allocation methods, the DQCA algorithm is distributed as each user performs the DQN process separately. The simulation results show that our proposed DQCA algorithm is superior to Greedy algorithm and Q-learning algorithm in terms of the average AoI, average energy consumption and system cost.