Online Learning in Autonomic Multi-Hop Wireless Networks for Transmitting Mission-Critical Applications

In this paper, the authors study how to optimize the transmission decisions of nodes aimed at supporting mission-critical applications, such as surveillance, security monitoring, and military operations, etc. They focus on a network scenario where multiple source nodes transmit simultaneously mission-critical data through relay nodes to one or multiple destinations in multi-hop Mission-Critical Networks (MCN). Due to the stringent delay constraints of mission-critical applications, propagating global network information back and forth to a central decision maker is not tolerable in the MCN. Hence, the MCN needs to be built by nodes that can make decisions autonomously, based on their local information.