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Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are affected by dynamic environments, variable signal fluctuations and interference. Thus, prompt actions are necessary to achieve dependable communications and meet quality of service requirements. To this end, the reactive algorithms used in literature and standards, both centralized and distributed ones, are too slow and prone to cascading failures, instability and sub-optimality. We explore the predictive power of machine learning to better exploit the local information available in the WSN nodes and make sense of global trends. We aim at predicting the configuration values that lead to network stability. In this work, we adopt the Q-learning algorithm to train WSNs to proactively start adapting in face of changing network conditions, acting on the available transmission power levels. Our aim is to prove that smart nodes lead to better network performance with the aid of simple machine learning.

Improving the users' Quality of Experience (QoE) in modern 3D Multimedia Systems is a challenging proposition, mainly due to our limited knowledge of 3D image Quality Assessment algorithms. While subjective QoE methods would better reflect the nature of human perception, these are not suitable in real-time automation cases. In this paper we tackle this issue from a new angle, using deep learning to make predictions on the user's QoE rather than trying to measure it through deterministic algorithms. We benchmark our method, dubbed Quality of Experience for 3D images through Factored Third Order Restricted Boltzmann Machine (Q3D-RBM), with subjective QoE methods, to determine its accuracy for different types of 3D images. The outcome is a Reduced Reference QoE assessment process for automatic image assessment and has significant potential to be extended to work on 3D video assessment.