From Freshness to Effectiveness: Goal-Oriented Sampling for Remote Decision Making

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Aimin, Wu, Shaohua, Lee, Gary C. F., Sun, Sumei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915780711415808
author Li, Aimin
Wu, Shaohua
Lee, Gary C. F.
Sun, Sumei
author_facet Li, Aimin
Wu, Shaohua
Lee, Gary C. F.
Sun, Sumei
contents Data freshness, measured by Age of Information (AoI), is highly relevant in networked applications such as Vehicle to Everything (V2X), smart health systems, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, freshness alone does not always equate to utility in decision-making. In decision-critical settings, some stale data may be more valuable than fresh updates. Motivated by this, we move beyond AoI-centric policies and investigate how data staleness affects remote decision-making effectiveness under random delay and limited communication resources. To this end, we propose AR-MDP, an Age-aware Remote Markov Decision Process framework, which co-designs optimal sampling and remote decision-making under a sampling frequency constraint and random delay. To efficiently solve this problem, we design a new two-stage hierarchical algorithm, namely Quick Bellman-Linear-Program (QuickBLP), where the first stage involves solving the Dinkelbach root of a Bellman variant and the second stage involves solving a streamlined linear program (LP). For the tricky first stage, we propose a new One-layer Primal-Dinkelbach Synchronous Iteration (OnePDSI) method, which overcomes the re-convergence and non-expansive divergence present in existing per-sample multi-layer algorithms. Through rigorous convergence analysis of our proposed algorithms, we establish that the worst-case optimality gap in OnePDSI exhibits exponential decay with respect to iteration $K$ at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{R^K})$. Through sensitivity analysis, we derive a threshold for the sampling frequency, beyond which additional sampling does not yield further gains in decision-making. Simulation results validate our analyses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19507
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Freshness to Effectiveness: Goal-Oriented Sampling for Remote Decision Making
Li, Aimin
Wu, Shaohua
Lee, Gary C. F.
Sun, Sumei
Information Theory
Data freshness, measured by Age of Information (AoI), is highly relevant in networked applications such as Vehicle to Everything (V2X), smart health systems, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, freshness alone does not always equate to utility in decision-making. In decision-critical settings, some stale data may be more valuable than fresh updates. Motivated by this, we move beyond AoI-centric policies and investigate how data staleness affects remote decision-making effectiveness under random delay and limited communication resources. To this end, we propose AR-MDP, an Age-aware Remote Markov Decision Process framework, which co-designs optimal sampling and remote decision-making under a sampling frequency constraint and random delay. To efficiently solve this problem, we design a new two-stage hierarchical algorithm, namely Quick Bellman-Linear-Program (QuickBLP), where the first stage involves solving the Dinkelbach root of a Bellman variant and the second stage involves solving a streamlined linear program (LP). For the tricky first stage, we propose a new One-layer Primal-Dinkelbach Synchronous Iteration (OnePDSI) method, which overcomes the re-convergence and non-expansive divergence present in existing per-sample multi-layer algorithms. Through rigorous convergence analysis of our proposed algorithms, we establish that the worst-case optimality gap in OnePDSI exhibits exponential decay with respect to iteration $K$ at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{R^K})$. Through sensitivity analysis, we derive a threshold for the sampling frequency, beyond which additional sampling does not yield further gains in decision-making. Simulation results validate our analyses.
title From Freshness to Effectiveness: Goal-Oriented Sampling for Remote Decision Making
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19507