Uplink power control plays a significant role in maintaining a good signal quality at the serving cell while minimizing interference to neighboring cells, thus maximizing the system performance. Traditionally, a single value open-loop power control (OLPC) parameter, P0, is configured for all the user equipments (UEs) in a cell, and often same setting is used for similar cells. Recent studies have demonstrated that optimal P0 depends on many factors, which yields a complex multidimensional optimization problem and there are no efficient approaches known to solve it under practical system-level settings. In this paper, we propose a solution based on reinforcement learning (RL) where each BS autonomously adjusts its P0 setting to maximize its throughput performance. As compared to conventional sub-optimal approach, our solution encompasses a smart clustering of UEs, where each cluster specifies its own P0. The proposed solution is evaluated by extensive system level simulations, where our results demonstrate a potential performance enhancement as compared to the baseline proposals.

An increasing number of emerging applications, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), vehicular communications, augmented reality, and the growing complexity due to the interoperability requirements of these systems, lead to the need to change the tools used for the modeling and analysis of those networks. Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as a bottom-up modeling approach considers a network of autonomous agents interacting with each other, and therefore represents an ideal framework to comprehend the interactions of heterogeneous nodes in a complex environment. Here, we investigate the suitability of ABM to model the communication aspects of a road traffic management system as an example of an IoT network. We model, analyze and compare various Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols for two different scenarios, namely uncoordinated and coordinated. Besides, we model the scheduling mechanisms for the coordinated scenario as a high level MAC protocol by using three different approaches: Centralized Decision Maker, DESYNC and decentralized learning MAC (L-MAC). The results clearly show the importance of coordination between multiple decision makers in order to improve the information reporting error and spectrum utilization of the system.