Q-Learning-Based High Credibility and Stability Routing Algorithm for Internet of Medical Things

Abstract EN

With the outbreak of COVID-19, people’s demand for using the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) for physical health monitoring has increased dramatically.

The considerable amount of data requires stable, reliable, and real-time transmission, which has become an urgent problem to be solved.

This paper constructs a health monitoring-enabled IoMT network which is composed of several users carrying wearable devices and a coordinator.

One of the important problems for the proposed network is the unstable and inefficient transmission of data packets caused by node congestion and link breakage in the routing process.

Based on these, we propose a Q-learning-based dynamic routing selection (QDRS) algorithm.

First, a mathematical model of path optimization and a solution named Global Routing selection with high Credibility and Stability (GRCS) is proposed to select the optimal path globally.

However, during the data transmission through the optimal path, the node and link status may change, causing packet loss or retransmission.

This is a problem not considered by standard routing algorithms.

Therefore, this paper proposes a local link dynamic adjustment scheme based on GRCS, using the Q-learning algorithm to select the optimal next-hop node for each intermediate forwarding node.

If the selected node is not the same as the original path, the chosen node replaces the downstream node in the original path and so corrects the optimal path in time.

This paper considers the congestion state, remaining energy, and mobility of the node when selecting the path and considers the network state changes during packet transmission, which is the most significant innovation of this paper.

The simulation results show that compared with other similar algorithms, the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the packet forwarding rate without seriously affecting the network energy consumption and delay.