Energy Conservation for Internet of Things Tracking Applications Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

The Internet of Things (IoT)-based target tracking system is required for applications such as smart farm, smart factory, and smart city where many sensor devices are jointly connected to collect the moving target positions. Each sensor device continuously runs on battery-operated power, consuming energy while perceiving target information in a particular environment. To reduce sensor device energy consumption in real-time IoT tracking applications, many traditional methods such as clustering, information-driven, and other approaches have previously been utilized to select the best sensor. However, applying machine learning methods, particularly deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), to address the problem of sensor selection in tracking applications is quite demanding because of the limited sensor node battery lifetime. In this study, we proposed a long short-term memory deep Q-network (DQN)-based Deep RL target tracking model to overcome the problem of energy consumption in IoT target applications. The proposed method is utilized to select the energy-efficient best sensor while tracking the target. The best sensor is defined by the minimum distance function (i.e., derived as the state), which leads to lower energy consumption. The simulation results show favorable features in terms of the best sensor selection and energy consumption.