Reinforcement Learning for Virtual Network Embedding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Upcoming sensing applications (acoustic or video) will have high processing requirements not satisfiable by a single node or need input from multiple sources (e.g., speaker localization). Offloading these applications to cloud or mobile edge is an option, but when running in a wireless senor network (WSN), it might entail needlessly high data rate and latency. An alternative is to spread processing inside the WSN, which is particularly attractive if the application comprises individual components. This scenario is typical for applications like acoustic signal processing. Mapping components to nodes can be formulated as wireless version of the NP-hard Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem, for which various heuristics exist. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, which relies on Q-Learning and uses either Greedy Epsilon or Epsilon Decay for exploration. We compare both exploration methods to the result of an optimization approach and show empirically that the RL framework achieves good results in terms of network delay within few number of steps.