Refining Network Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network Using Energy-Efficient Clustering and DRL-Based Sleep Scheduling.

Over the recent era, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has attracted much attention among industrialists and researchers owing to its contribution to numerous applications including military, environmental monitoring and so on. However, reducing the network delay and improving the network lifetime are always big issues in the domain of WSN. To resolve these downsides, we propose an Energy-Efficient Scheduling using the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) (E2S-DRL) algorithm in WSN. E2S-DRL contributes three phases to prolong network lifetime and to reduce network delay that is: the clustering phase, duty-cycling phase and routing phase. E2S-DRL starts with the clustering phase where we reduce the energy consumption incurred during data aggregation. It is achieved through the Zone-based Clustering (ZbC) scheme. In the ZbC scheme, hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithms are utilized. Duty cycling is adopted in the second phase by executing the DRL algorithm, from which, E2S-DRL reduces the energy consumption of individual sensor nodes effectually. The transmission delay is mitigated in the third (routing) phase using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and the Firefly Algorithm (FFA). Our work is modeled in Network Simulator 3.26 (NS3). The results are valuable in provisions of upcoming metrics including network lifetime, energy consumption, throughput and delay. From this evaluation, it is proved that our E2S-DRL reduces energy consumption, reduces delays by up to 40% and enhances throughput and network lifetime up to 35% compared to the existing cTDMA, DRA, LDC and iABC methods.

Dataset of Virginia Flue-cured Tobacco Leaf images based on stalk leaf position for classification tasks: A case of Tanzania.

Nicotiana tabacum is a kind of plant cultivated for its leaves used for manufacturing medicine and cigarettes. With the common name, the Tobacco plant is grown in many countries including China, Indonesia, Malawi and Tanzania just to mention a few. Literatures suggest a technical gap in the proper identification of grade labels for various parts of the plant. In addition, manual grading has resulted in various gaps and biases. To mitigate this, a data-driven grading solution is necessary. However, relevant datasets to train grade classifiers from various countries become of the essence. This article presents images concentrated on tobacco leaf plant position namely Leaf position which normally carries 23 grade labels. Due to high rainfall which swiped away the applied fertilizer on the tobacco plants in the farms, we failed to get images of one grade. Therefore, this research could capture and label 22 grade labels. Images of tobacco leaves based on the tobacco plant position were collected in Tanzania through participatory community research. Canon 5D mark III cameras with 100 mm micro lens were used to take pictures of tobacco leaves based on the tobacco plant position. Domain experts were used for image labelling and cleaning according to tobacco grade labels identified in Tanzania. The dataset carries 49,779 images, which can be used to develop machine learning models for tobacco leaf grade label identification. The collected dataset can be used to train models and enhance the performance of pre-trained models in any country of interest.