Reinforcement-Learning-Enabled Massive Internet of Things for 6G Wireless Communications

Ali, R, Ashraf, I, Bashir, AK and Zikria, YB (2021) Reinforcement-Learning-Enabled Massive Internet of Things for 6G Wireless Communications. IEEE Communications Standards Magazine, 5 (2). pp. 126-131. ISSN 2471-2825

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Abstract

Recently, extensive research efforts have been devoted to developing beyond fifth generation (B5G), also referred to as sixth generation (6G) wireless networks aimed at bringing ultra-reli-able low-latency communication services. 6G is expected to extend 5G capabilities to higher communication levels where numerous connected devices and sensors can operate seamlessly. One of the major research focuses of 6G is to enable massive Internet of Things (mIoT) applications. Like Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), forthcoming wireless communication networks are likely to meet massively deployed devices and extremely new smart applications such as smart cities for mIoT. However, channel scarcity is still present due to a massive number of connected devices accessing the common spectrum resources. With this expectation, next-generation Wi-Fi 6 and beyond for mIoT are anticipated to have inherent machine intelligence capabilities to access the optimum channel resources for their performance optimization. Unfortunately, current wireless communication network standards do not support the ensuing needs of machine learning (ML)-aware frameworks in terms of resource allocation optimization. Keeping such an issue in mind, we propose a reinforcement-learning-based, one of the ML techniques, a framework for a wireless channel access mechanism for IEEE 802.11 standards (i.e., Wi-Fi) in mIoT. The proposed mechanism suggests exploiting a practically measured channel collision probability as a collected dataset from the wireless environment to select optimal resource allocation in mIoT for upcoming 6G wireless communications.