A Reinforcement Learning-Based Dynamic Clustering Algorithm for Compressive Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Compressive data gathering (CDG) is an effective technique to handle large amounts of data transmissions in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, CDG with static clustering cannot adapt to time-varying environments in WSNs. In this paper, a reinforcement learning-based dynamic clustering algorithm (RLDCA) for CDG in WSNs is proposed. It is a dynamic and adaptive clustering method aiming to further reduce data transmissions and energy consumption in WSNs. Sensor nodes act as reinforcement learning (RL) agents which can observe the environment and dynamically select a cluster to join in. These RL agents are instructed by a well-designed reward scheme to join a cluster with strong data correlation and proper distance. It is also a distributed and lightweight learning method. All agents are independent and operate in parallel. Additional overheads introduced by RL are lightweight. Computations of a linear reward function and a few comparison operations are needed. It is implementable in WSNs. Simulations performed in MATLAB validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the desired effect as well as fine convergence. It decreases data transmissions by 16.6% and 54.4% and energy consumption by 6% and 29%, respectively, compared to the two contrastive schemes.