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Machine learning for a 5G future




           transceivers, the main limiting factor in increasing network   hardware-constrained IoT devices. The solution based on an
           performance. By carefully discarding non-critical events in   Artificial Neural Network (ANN) optimizes the use of the
           more demanding scenarios (i.e. where larger values of    are   available RATs (5G and LoRa), leading to an improvement
           present),  our  proposed  policy  can  get  the  most  out  of  the   in the attained rewards of up to 75.6% when compared to
           allocated resources (battery and 5G daily quota) to maximize   other policies. Although the precise presented results depend
           obtained  rewards.  Figure  3  corroborates  this  statement  by   on  the  parameters  of  the  simulated  network  (and,  deeply
           analyzing  the  typical  usage  of  each  RAT  made  by  our   studying other scenarios is left as a future work), we truly
           proposed policy and the 5G-first policy. 5G transmissions   believe  that  this  work  has  served  its  purpose:  to  raise
           are depicted in blue stars, LoRa transmissions in red circles,   awareness  about  the  potential  use  of  ML  techniques  in
           and discarded packets in black crosses. Two variables are   deriving transmission policies that could make the future 5G
           analyzed:  packet  length  and  packet  priority  (the  rest  of   standard feasible for the IoT revolution.
           variables are not shown for the sake of clarity, although they
           still play an important role in deciding on the RAT). Note   Furthermore, there are plans to extend the presented work
           how the proposed policy (left picture) tends to discard large   with traffic traces generated from IoT devices –so that the
           non-important packets (shown in the bottom right side of the   derived ANN-based transmission policy can learn from real
           picture)  while  high-importance  packets  are  normally   data–.  Nevertheless,  authors  believe  that  the  traffic
           transmitted via 5G-cellular links. LoRa is employed when   generation patterns are in-line with actual IoT deployments
           either the packet priority is not high, the packet is relatively   (as indicated in the Simulation Section).
           large or the 5G daily quota has been exhausted (this variable
           is not shown in Figure 3). Conversely, the 5G-first policy         8.  REFERENCES
           disregards packet properties and makes an excessive  early
           use of 5G transmission (note that there are far more blue stars   [1]   P. Kulkarni and T. Farnham, “Smart City Wireless
           than red circles) until 5G daily quota is exhausted and LoRa   Connectivity  Considerations  and  Cost  Analysis:
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           their importance and thus, there is a homogenous distribution   IEEE Access, vol. 4, pp. 660–672, 2016.
           of black dots.
                                                               [2]   R.  Martinez-Sandoval,  A.  J.  Garcia-Sanchez,  F.
           The reason  why  the  priority-based policy performs  worse   Garcia-Sanchez, J. Garcia-Haro, and D. Flynn, “A
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           scenarios, it is the battery and not the 5G daily quota the
           limiting factor). Finally, the random policy makes the same   [3]   F.  Orfei,  C.  Benedetta  Mezzetti,  and  F.  Cottone,
           mistakes as the priority-based policy while also disregarding   “Vibrations   powered   LoRa   sensor:   An
           event priorities; hence the lower attained   .           electromechanical  energy  harvester  working  on  a
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                          7.  CONCLUSION                            3.
                                                               [4]   J.  G.  James  and  S.  Nair,  “Efficient,  real-time
           5G has proved itself to be a future revolution in the way in
           which, not only users, but also machines could communicate   tracking of public transport, using LoRaWAN and
                                                                    RF  transceivers,”  in  TENCON  2017  -  2017  IEEE
           with  their  peers.  It  is  precisely  in  this  type  of
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                                                                    2258–2261.
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           may not be fully geared towards the very sporadic and bursty   [5]   A. Orsino, G. Araniti, L. Militano, J. Alonso-Zarate,
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           that  IoT  devices  could  potentially  benefit  from  having   Collection  in  Smart  Cities  Exploiting  D2D
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                                                               [6]   M.  Centenaro,  L.  Vangelista,  A.  Zanella,  and  M.
           To evidence this, we have presented a mathematical model   Zorzi,  “Long-range  communications  in  unlicensed
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           popularized by the Machine Learning (ML) research field. In
           particular,  a  Genetic  Algorithm  known  as  Evolution   [7]   M.  Agiwal,  A.  Roy,  and  N.  Saxena,  “Next
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           still  being  computationally  light-weight  enough  to  run  in





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