Data prioritization aware resource allocation in internet of vehicles using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are facing the limitation of spectral resources and stringent real time communication requirements. How to effectively allocate system resources for maximizing the performance in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is still a substantial challenge, particularly the priority and urgency of different types of data need to be focused. To improve the allocation spectrum resources and optimize transmission power while taking into the dynamic characteristics of vehicles and data priorities account, we design a time-series-based multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework (NL-MAPPO for short), in this paper. First, we formulate the joint optimization problem as a multi-agent Markov decision process to ensure the minimization of transmission delays and energy consumption when the total vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) link capacity is maximized. Here, V2V link capacity refers to the maximum achievable data rate for direct communication between vehicles, which depends on factors such as signal strength, interference, and available bandwidth. Then, we design a multi-agent resource allocation algorithm based on a shared-critic mechanism to realize the global sharing of channel information and solve the optimization problem. Finally, to improve efficiency, we also introduce a time series-based channel information extraction mechanism to capture the temporal characteristics of channel information. The simulation experiments were conducted and the results demonstrated that our proposed NL-MAPPO can demonstrate superiority in multiple metrics.