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Task-oriented Age of Information for Remote Monitoring Systems

Shuying Gan, Xijun Wang, Chao Xu, Xiang Chen

TL;DR

This work introduces an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks.

Abstract

The emergence of intelligent applications has fostered the development of a task-oriented communication paradigm, where a comprehensive, universal, and practical metric is crucial for unleashing the potential of this paradigm. To this end, we introduce an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks. Also, we study the TAoI in a remote monitoring system, whose task is to identify target images and transmit them for subsequent analysis. We formulate the dynamic transmission problem as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) and transform it into an equivalent Markov Decision Process (MDP) to minimize TAoI and find the optimal transmission policy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal strategy is a threshold-based policy regarding TAoI and propose a relative value iteration algorithm based on the threshold structure to obtain the optimal transmission policy. Finally, simulation results show the superior performance of the optimal transmission policy compared to the baseline policies.

Task-oriented Age of Information for Remote Monitoring Systems

TL;DR

This work introduces an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks.

Abstract

The emergence of intelligent applications has fostered the development of a task-oriented communication paradigm, where a comprehensive, universal, and practical metric is crucial for unleashing the potential of this paradigm. To this end, we introduce an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks. Also, we study the TAoI in a remote monitoring system, whose task is to identify target images and transmit them for subsequent analysis. We formulate the dynamic transmission problem as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) and transform it into an equivalent Markov Decision Process (MDP) to minimize TAoI and find the optimal transmission policy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal strategy is a threshold-based policy regarding TAoI and propose a relative value iteration algorithm based on the threshold structure to obtain the optimal transmission policy. Finally, simulation results show the superior performance of the optimal transmission policy compared to the baseline policies.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 11 sections, 4 theorems, 24 equations, 5 figures, 1 table, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. System Overview
  3. System Model
  4. Task-oriented Age of Information
  5. Optimization Problem
  6. SMDP Formulation and Solution
  7. SMDP Formulation
  8. Structural Analysis and Optimal Transmission Policy
  9. Simulation results
  10. Conclusions
  11. Proof of Theorem 1

Key Result

Lemma 1

The value function $V(\Delta,F(X))$ is non-decreasing with $\Delta$ for any given $F(X)$.

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: An illustration of the task-oriented monitoring system.
  • Figure 2: An illustration of time slots and time steps.
  • Figure 3: An illustration of the evolution of TAoI ($T_{u}=3$).
  • Figure 4: Average TAoI versus $T_{u}$ ($q=0.9$, $p_{A}=p_{B}=0.1$).
  • Figure 5: Average TAoI versus $q$ ($T_{u}=100$, $p_{A}=p_{B}=0.1$).

Theorems & Definitions (4)

  • Lemma 1
  • Lemma 2
  • Lemma 3
  • Theorem 4