Learning to Speak on Behalf of a Group: Medium Access Control for Sending a Shared Message

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new communication problem in IoT networks where sensors must reliably share a joint message without explicit coordination, proposing theoretical analysis and practical solutions including a distributed multi-armed bandit approach.

Contribution

It defines a novel IoT communication problem and offers low-complexity, distributed solutions, including a bandit-based method, for implicit coordination in shared channels.

Findings

Clustering-based approach is near-optimal with prior knowledge.

Distributed MAB solution effectively ensures message delivery.

Simulation validates the proposed methods.

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has not only enabled new applications, but also presented new challenges for reliable communication with limited resources. In this work, we define a novel problem that can arise in these scenarios, in which a set of sensors need to communicate a joint observation. This observation is shared by a random subset of the nodes, which need to propagate it to the rest of the network, but coordination is complex: as signaling constraints require the use of random access schemes over shared channels, sensors need to implicitly coordinate, so that at least one transmission gets through without collisions. Unlike the majority of existing medium access schemes, the goal is to make sure that the shared message gets through, regardless of the sender. We analyze this coordination problem theoretically and provide low-complexity solutions. While a clustering-based approach is near-optimal if the sensors have prior knowledge, we provide a distributed multi-armed bandit (MAB) solution for the more general case and validate it by simulation.