Value of Communication in Goal-Oriented Semantic Communications: A Pareto Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Luo, Jiping, Li, Bowen, Pappas, Nikolaos
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908683876696064
author Luo, Jiping
Li, Bowen
Pappas, Nikolaos
author_facet Luo, Jiping
Li, Bowen
Pappas, Nikolaos
contents Emerging cyber-physical systems increasingly operate under stringent communication constraints that preclude the reliable transmission of their extensive machine-type data streams. Since raw measurements often contain correlated or redundant components, effective operation depends not on transmitting all available data but on selecting the information that contributes to achieving the objectives of the system. Beyond accuracy, goal-oriented semantic communication assesses the \emph{value of information} and aims to generate and transmit only what is relevant and at the right time. Motivated by this perspective, this work studies the \emph{value of communication} through the canonical setting of remote estimation of Markov sources, where a value-of-information measure quantifies the relevance of information. We investigate how optimal estimation performance varies with the available communication budget and determine the marginal performance gain attributable to additional communication. Our approach is based on a \emph{Pareto analysis} that characterizes the complete set of policies that achieve optimal trade-offs between estimation performance and communication cost. The value of communication is defined as the absolute slope of the resulting Pareto frontier. Although computing this frontier is non-trivial, we demonstrate that in our setting it admits a notably tractable structure: it is strictly decreasing, convex, and piecewise linear, and its slope is governed by a finite collection of constants. Moreover, each Pareto-optimal operating point is realizable as a convex combination of two stationary deterministic policies, enabling practical implementation. Leveraging these structural insights, we introduce SPLIT, an efficient and provably optimal algorithm for constructing the complete Pareto frontier.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Value of Communication in Goal-Oriented Semantic Communications: A Pareto Analysis
Luo, Jiping
Li, Bowen
Pappas, Nikolaos
Information Theory
Networking and Internet Architecture
Systems and Control
Emerging cyber-physical systems increasingly operate under stringent communication constraints that preclude the reliable transmission of their extensive machine-type data streams. Since raw measurements often contain correlated or redundant components, effective operation depends not on transmitting all available data but on selecting the information that contributes to achieving the objectives of the system. Beyond accuracy, goal-oriented semantic communication assesses the \emph{value of information} and aims to generate and transmit only what is relevant and at the right time. Motivated by this perspective, this work studies the \emph{value of communication} through the canonical setting of remote estimation of Markov sources, where a value-of-information measure quantifies the relevance of information. We investigate how optimal estimation performance varies with the available communication budget and determine the marginal performance gain attributable to additional communication. Our approach is based on a \emph{Pareto analysis} that characterizes the complete set of policies that achieve optimal trade-offs between estimation performance and communication cost. The value of communication is defined as the absolute slope of the resulting Pareto frontier. Although computing this frontier is non-trivial, we demonstrate that in our setting it admits a notably tractable structure: it is strictly decreasing, convex, and piecewise linear, and its slope is governed by a finite collection of constants. Moreover, each Pareto-optimal operating point is realizable as a convex combination of two stationary deterministic policies, enabling practical implementation. Leveraging these structural insights, we introduce SPLIT, an efficient and provably optimal algorithm for constructing the complete Pareto frontier.
title Value of Communication in Goal-Oriented Semantic Communications: A Pareto Analysis
topic Information Theory
Networking and Internet Architecture
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01454