Human-in-the-Loop Wireless Communications: Machine Learning and Brain-Aware Resource Management

Human-centric applications such as virtual reality and immersive gaming are central to future wireless networks. Common features of such services include: 1) their dependence on the human user's behavior and state and 2) their need for more network resources compared to conventional applications. To successfully deploy such applications over wireless networks, the network must be made cognizant of not only the quality-of-service (QoS) needs of the applications, but also of the perceptions of the human users on this QoS. In this paper, by explicitly modeling the limitations of the human brain, a concrete measure for the delay perception of human users is introduced. Then, a learning method, called probability distribution identification, is developed to find a probabilistic model for this delay perception based on the brain features of a human user. Given the learned model for the delay perception of the human brain, a brain-aware resource management algorithm based on Lyapunov optimization is proposed for allocating radio resources to human users while minimizing the transmit power and taking into account the reliability of both machine type devices and human users. Then, a closed-form relationship between the reliability measure and wireless physical layer metrics of the network is derived. Simulation results show that a brain-aware approach can yield savings of up to 78% in power compared to the system that only considers QoS metrics. The results also show that, compared with QoS-aware, brain-unaware systems, the brain-aware approach can save substantially more power in low-latency systems.