Multiagent Self-Redundancy Identification and Tuned Greedy-Exploration

IEEE Trans Cybern. 2022 Jul;52(7):5744-5755. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2020.3035783. Epub 2022 Jul 4.

Abstract

The constant development of sensing applications using innovative and affordable measurement devices has increased the amount of data transmitted through networks, carrying in many cases, redundant information that requires more time to be analyzed or larger storage centers. This redundancy is mainly present because the network nodes do not recognize environmental variations requiring exploration, which causes a repetitive data collection in a set of limited locations. In this work, we propose a multiagent learning framework that uses the Gaussian process regression (GPR) to allow the agents to predict the environmental behavior by means of the neighborhood measurements, and the rate distortion function to establish a border in which the environmental information is neither misunderstood nor redundant. We apply this framework to a mobile sensor network and demonstrate that the nodes can tune the parameter s of the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm in order to adjust the gathered environment information and to become more or less exploratory within a sensing area.