Restoration-Aware Sleep Scheduling Framework in Energy Harvesting Internet of Things: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Energy harvesting Internet of Things (IoT) devices are capable of sensing only intermittent and coarse-grained data due to sleep scheduling; therefore, we develop a restoration mechanism (e.g., probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF)) that exploits spatial and temporal correlations of data to build up an environmental monitoring system. However, even with a well-designed restoration mechanism, a high accuracy of the environmental map cannot be achieved if an appropriate sleep scheduling of IoT devices is not incorporated (e.g., if IoT devices at necessary locations are in sleep mode or are not involved in restoration due to their insufficient energy). In this paper, we propose a restoration-aware sleep scheduling (RASS) framework for energy harvesting IoT-based environmental monitoring systems. Here, RASS involves customized deep reinforcement learning (DRL) considering the restoration mechanism, using which the controller performs sleep scheduling to achieve high accuracy of the restored environmental map while avoiding energy outage of IoT devices. The evaluation results demonstrate that RASS can achieve an environmental map with 5% or a lower difference from the actual values and fair energy consumption among IoT devices.