UbiPriSEQ—Deep reinforcement learning to manage privacy, security, energy, and QoS in 5G IoT hetnets

5G networks and Internet of Things (IoT) offer a powerful platform for ubiquitous environments with their ubiquitous sensing, high speeds and other benefits. The data, analytics, and other computations need to be optimally moved and placed in these environments, dynamically, such that energy-efficiency and QoS demands are best satisfied. A particular challenge in this context is to preserve privacy and security while delivering quality of service (QoS) and energy-efficiency. Many works have tried to address these challenges but without a focus on optimizing all of them and assuming fixed models of environments and security threats. This paper proposes the UbiPriSEQ framework that uses Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to adaptively, dynamically, and holistically optimize QoS, energy-efficiency, security, and privacy. UbiPriSEQ is built on a three-layered model and comprises two modules. UbiPriSEQ devises policies and makes decisions related to important parameters including local processing and offloading rates for data and computations, radio channel states, transmit power, task priority, and selection of fog nodes for offloading, data migration, and so forth. UbiPriSEQ is implemented in Python over the TensorFlow platform and is evaluated using a real-life application in terms of SINR, privacy metric, latency, and utility function, manifesting great promise.