Resource-aware task scheduling by an adversarial bandit solver method in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of tiny sensor nodes. Sensor nodes are very resource-constrained, since nodes are often battery-operated and energy is a scarce resource. In this paper, a resource-aware task scheduling (RATS) method is proposed with better performance/resource consumption trade-off in a WSN. Particularly, RATS exploits an adversarial bandit solver method called exponential weight for exploration and exploitation (Exp3) for target tracking application of WSN. The proposed RATS method is compared and evaluated with the existing scheduling methods exploiting online learning: distributed independent reinforcement learning (DIRL), reinforcement learning (RL), and cooperative reinforcement learning (CRL), in terms of the tracking quality/energy consumption trade-off in a target tracking application. The communication overhead and computational effort of these methods are also computed. Simulation results show that the proposed RATS outperforms the existing methods DIRL and RL in terms of achieved tracking performance.