UAV-Aided Lifelong Learning for AoI and Energy Optimization in Nonstationary IoT Networks

In this paper, a novel joint energy and age of information (AoI) optimization framework for IoT devices in a non-stationary environment is presented. In particular, IoT devices that are distributed in the real-world are required to efficiently utilize their computing resources so as to balance the freshness of their data and their energy consumption. To optimize the performance of IoT devices in such a dynamic setting, a novel lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) solution that enables IoT devices to continuously adapt their policies to each newly encountered environment is proposed. Given that IoT devices have limited energy and computing resources, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is leveraged to visit the IoT devices and update the policy of each device sequentially. As such, the UAV is exploited as a mobile learning agent that can learn a shared knowledge base with a feature base in its training phase, and feature sets of a zero-shot learning method in its testing phase, to generalize between the environments. To optimize the trajectory and flying velocity of the UAV, an actor-critic network is leveraged so as to minimize the UAV energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed lifelong RL solution can outperform the state-of-art benchmarks by enhancing the balanced cost of IoT devices by 8.3% when incorporating warm-start policies for unseen environments. In addition, our solution achieves up to 49.38% reduction in terms of energy consumption by the UAV in comparison to the random flying strategy.