Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

Modern Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Nodes (EHWSNs) need to intelligently allocate their limited and unreliable energy budget among multiple tasks to ensure long-term uninterrupted operation. Traditional solutions are ill-equipped to deal with multiple objectives and execute a posteriori tradeoffs. We propose a general Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) framework for Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) of EHWSNs. Our proposed framework consists of a novel Multi-objective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP) formulation and two novel MORL algorithms. Using our framework, EHWSNs can learn policies to maximize multiple task-objectives and perform dynamic runtime tradeoffs. The high computation and learning costs, usually associated with powerful MORL algorithms, can be avoided by using our comparatively less resource-intensive MORL algorithms. We evaluate our framework on a general single-task and dual-task EHWSN system model through simulations and show that our MORL algorithms can successfully tradeoff between multiple objectives at runtime.