Learning-Based Sensor Scheduling for Delay-Aware and Stable Remote State Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tran, Nho-Duc, Mahmood, Aamir, Gidlund, Mikael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Tran, Nho-Duc
Mahmood, Aamir
Gidlund, Mikael
author_facet Tran, Nho-Duc
Mahmood, Aamir
Gidlund, Mikael
contents Unpredictable sensor-to-estimator delays fundamentally distort what matters for wireless remote state estimation: not just freshness, but how delay interacts with sensor informativeness and energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a unified, delay-aware framework that models this coupling explicitly and quantifies a delay-dependent information gain, motivating an information-per-joule scheduling objective beyond age of information proxies (AoI). To this end, we first introduce an efficient posterior-fusion update that incorporates delayed measurements without state augmentation, providing a consistent approximation to optimal delayed Kalman updates, and then derive tractable stability conditions ensuring that bounded estimation error is achievable under stochastic, delayed scheduling. This conditions highlight the need for unstable modes to be observable across sensors. Building on this foundation, we cast scheduling as a Markov decision process and develop a proximal policy optimization (PPO) scheduler that learns directly from interaction, requires no prior delay model, and explicitly trades off estimation accuracy, freshness, sensor heterogeneity, and transmission energy through normalized rewards. In simulations with heterogeneous sensors, realistic link-energy models, and random delays, the proposed method learns stably and consistently achieves lower estimation error at comparable energy than random scheduling and strong RL baselines (DQN, A2C), while remaining robust to variations in measurement availability and process/measurement noise.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21482
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning-Based Sensor Scheduling for Delay-Aware and Stable Remote State Estimation
Tran, Nho-Duc
Mahmood, Aamir
Gidlund, Mikael
Information Theory
Unpredictable sensor-to-estimator delays fundamentally distort what matters for wireless remote state estimation: not just freshness, but how delay interacts with sensor informativeness and energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a unified, delay-aware framework that models this coupling explicitly and quantifies a delay-dependent information gain, motivating an information-per-joule scheduling objective beyond age of information proxies (AoI). To this end, we first introduce an efficient posterior-fusion update that incorporates delayed measurements without state augmentation, providing a consistent approximation to optimal delayed Kalman updates, and then derive tractable stability conditions ensuring that bounded estimation error is achievable under stochastic, delayed scheduling. This conditions highlight the need for unstable modes to be observable across sensors. Building on this foundation, we cast scheduling as a Markov decision process and develop a proximal policy optimization (PPO) scheduler that learns directly from interaction, requires no prior delay model, and explicitly trades off estimation accuracy, freshness, sensor heterogeneity, and transmission energy through normalized rewards. In simulations with heterogeneous sensors, realistic link-energy models, and random delays, the proposed method learns stably and consistently achieves lower estimation error at comparable energy than random scheduling and strong RL baselines (DQN, A2C), while remaining robust to variations in measurement availability and process/measurement noise.
title Learning-Based Sensor Scheduling for Delay-Aware and Stable Remote State Estimation
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21482