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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
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