CoRL: Collaborative Reinforcement Learning-Based MAC Protocol for IoT Networks

Abstract

Devices used in Internet of Things (IoT) networks continue to perform sensing, gathering, modifying, and forwarding data. Since IoT networks have a lot of participants, mitigating and reducing collisions among the participants becomes an essential requirement for the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to increase system performance. A collision occurs in wireless channel when two or more nodes try to access the channel at the same time. In this paper, a reinforcement learning-based MAC protocol was proposed to provide high throughput and alleviate the collision problem. A collaboratively predicted Q-value was proposed for nodes to update their value functions by using communications trial information of other nodes. Our proposed protocol was confirmed by intensive system level simulations that it can reduce convergence time in 34.1% compared to the conventional Q-learning-based MAC protocol.