학술논문

Learning to Speak on Behalf of a Group: Medium Access Control for Sending a Shared Message
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Communications Letters IEEE Commun. Lett. Communications Letters, IEEE. 26(8):1843-1847 Aug, 2022
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Internet of Things
Throughput
Reliability
Correlation
Optimization
Numerical models
Media Access Protocol
Distributed coordination
multi-armed bandit
Thompson sampling
random access
Language
ISSN
1089-7798
1558-2558
2373-7891
Abstract
The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has not only enabled new applications, but also presented new challenges for reliable communication with limited resources. In this work, we define a novel problem that can arise in these scenarios, in which a set of sensors need to communicate a joint observation. This observation is shared by a random subset of the nodes, which need to propagate it to the rest of the network, but coordination is complex: as signaling constraints require the use of random access schemes over shared channels, sensors need to implicitly coordinate, so that at least one transmission gets through without collisions. Unlike the majority of existing medium access schemes, the goal is to make sure that the shared message gets through, regardless of the sender. We analyze this coordination problem theoretically and provide low-complexity solutions. While a clustering-based approach is near-optimal if the sensors have prior knowledge, we provide a distributed multi-armed bandit (MAB) solution for the more general case and validate it by simulation.