In this work, we study a status update system with a source node sending timely information to the destination through a channel with random delay. We measure the timeliness of the information stored at the receiver via the Age of Information (AoI), the time elapsed since the freshest sample stored at the receiver is generated. The goal is to design a sampling strategy that minimizes the total cost of the expected time average AoI and sampling cost in the absence of transmission delay statistics. We reformulate the total cost minimization problem as the optimization of a renewal-reward process, and propose an online sampling strategy based on the Robbins-Monro algorithm. We show that, when the transmission delay is bounded, the expected time average total cost obtained by the proposed online algorithm converges to the minimum cost when $K$ goes to infinity, and the optimality gap decays with rate $\mathcal{O}\left(\ln K/K\right)$, where $K$ is the number of samples we have taken. Simulation results validate the performance of our proposed algorithm.
In status update systems, multiple features carried by the status updating process require pursuit of objectives beyond timeliness measured by the age of information of updates. We consider such a problem where the transmitter sends status update messages through a noiseless binary energy harvesting channel that is equivalent to a timing channel. The transmitter aims to amplify or mask the energy state information that is carried in the updating process. The receiver extracts encoded information, infers the energy state sequence while maintaining timeliness of status updates. Consequently, the timings of the updates must be designed to control the message rate, the energy state uncertainty, and the age of information. We investigate this three-way trade-off between the achievable rate, the reduction in energy arrival state uncertainty, and the age of information, for zero and infinite battery cases.
Safety-critical technical systems operating in unknown environments require the ability to quickly adapt their behavior, which can be achieved in control by inferring a model online from the data stream generated during operation. Gaussian process-based learning is particularly well suited for safety-critical applications as it ensures bounded prediction errors. While there exist computationally efficient approximations for online inference, these approaches lack guarantees for the prediction error and have high memory requirements, and are therefore not applicable to safety-critical systems with tight memory constraints. In this work, we propose a novel networked online learning approach based on Gaussian process regression, which addresses the issue of limited local resources by employing remote data management in the cloud. Our approach formally guarantees a bounded tracking error with high probability, which is exploited to identify the most relevant data to achieve a certain control performance. We further propose an effective data transmission scheme between the local system and the cloud taking bandwidth limitations and time delay of the transmission channel into account. The effectiveness of the proposed method is successfully demonstrated in a simulation.
The channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) play an important role in the performance of wireless networks. The CSIT model can be delayed and imperfect-quality, since the feedback link has a delay and the channel state information (CSI) feedback has distortion. In this paper, we thus characterize the degrees-of-freedom (DoF) region of the two-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel with delayed imperfect-quality CSIT, where the antenna configurations can be arbitrary. The converse proof of DoF region is based on the enhancement of physically degraded channel. The achievability proof of DoF region is through a novel transmission scheme design, where the duration of each phase and the amount of transmitted symbols are configured based on the imperfect-quality of delayed CSIT. As a result, we show that the DoF region with delayed imperfect-quality CSIT is located between the DoF region with no CSIT and the DoF region with delayed CSIT.
For scenes such as floods and earthquakes, the disaster area is large, and rescue time is tight. Multi-UAV exploration is more efficient than a single UAV. Existing UAV exploration work is modeled as a Coverage Path Planning (CPP) task to achieve full coverage of the area in the presence of obstacles. However, the endurance capability of UAV is limited, and the rescue time is urgent. Thus, even using multiple UAVs cannot achieve complete disaster area coverage in time. Therefore, in this paper we propose a multi-Agent Endurance-limited CPP (MAEl-CPP) problem based on a priori heatmap of the disaster area, which requires the exploration of more valuable areas under limited energy. Furthermore, we propose a path planning algorithm for the MAEl-CPP problem, by ranking the possible disaster areas according to their importance through satellite or remote aerial images and completing path planning according to the importance level. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm is at least twice as effective as the existing method in terms of search efficiency.
How well can we approximate a quantum channel output state using a random codebook with a certain size? In this work, we study the quantum soft covering problem. Namely, we use a random codebook with codewords independently sampled from a prior distribution and send it through a classical-quantum channel to approximate the target state. When using a random codebook sampled from an independent and identically distributed prior with a rate above the quantum mutual information, we show that the expected trace distance between the codebook-induced state and the target state decays with exponent given by the sandwiched R\'enyi information. On the other hand, when the rate of the codebook size is below the quantum mutual information, the trace distance converges to one exponentially fast. We obtain similar results when using a random constant composition codebook, whereas the sandwiched Augustin information expresses the error exponent. In addition to the above large deviation analysis, our results also hold in the moderate deviation regime. That is, we show that even when the rate of the codebook size approaches the quantum mutual information moderately quickly, the trace distance still vanishes asymptotically.
This paper studies a Stackelberg game wherein a sender (leader) attempts to shape the information of a less informed receiver (follower) who in turn takes an action that determines the payoff of both players. The sender chooses signals to maximize its own utility function while the receiver aims to ascertain the value of a source that is privately known to the sender. It is well known that such sender-receiver games admit a vast number of equilibria and not all signals from the sender can be relied on as truthful. Our main contribution is an exact characterization of the minimum number of distinct source symbols that can be correctly recovered by a receiver in \textit{any} equilibrium of this game; we call this quantity the \textit{informativeness} of the sender. We show that the informativeness is given by the \textit{vertex clique cover number} of a certain graph induced by the utility function, whereby it can be computed based on the utility function alone without the need to enumerate all equilibria. We find that informativeness characterizes the existence of well-known classes of separating, pooling and semi-separating equilibria. We also compare informativeness with the amount of information obtained by the receiver when it is the leader and show that the informativeness is always greater than the latter, implying that the receiver is better off being a follower.
In this work, we consider a remote monitoring scenario in which multiple sensors share a wireless channel to deliver their status updates to a process monitor via an access point (AP). Moreover, we consider that the sensors randomly arrive and depart from the network as they become active and inactive. The goal of the sensors is to devise a medium access strategy to collectively minimize the long-term mean network \ac{AoI} of their respective processes at the remote monitor. For this purpose, we propose specific modifications to ALOHA-QT algorithm, a distributed medium access algorithm that employs a policy tree (PT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve high throughput. We provide the upper bound on the mean network Age of Information (AoI) for the proposed algorithm along with pointers for selecting its key parameter. The results reveal that the proposed algorithm reduces mean network \ac{AoI} by more than 50 percent for state of the art stationary randomized policies while successfully adjusting to a changing number of active users in the network. The algorithm needs less memory and computation than ALOHA-QT while performing better in terms of AoI.
Single-leg revenue management is a foundational problem of revenue management that has been particularly impactful in the airline and hotel industry: Given $n$ units of a resource, e.g. flight seats, and a stream of sequentially-arriving customers segmented by fares, what is the optimal online policy for allocating the resource. Previous work focused on designing algorithms when forecasts are available, which are not robust to inaccuracies in the forecast, or online algorithms with worst-case performance guarantees, which can be too conservative in practice. In this work, we look at the single-leg revenue management problem through the lens of the algorithms-with-advice framework, which attempts to optimally incorporate advice/predictions about the future into online algorithms. In particular, we characterize the Pareto frontier that captures the tradeoff between consistency (performance when advice is accurate) and competitiveness (performance when advice is inaccurate) for every advice. Moreover, we provide an online algorithm that always achieves performance on this Pareto frontier. We also study the class of protection level policies, which is the most widely-deployed technique for single-leg revenue management: we provide an algorithm to incorporate advice into protection levels that optimally trades off consistency and competitiveness. Moreover, we empirically evaluate the performance of these algorithms on synthetic data. We find that our algorithm for protection level policies performs remarkably well on most instances, even if it is not guaranteed to be on the Pareto frontier in theory.
Federated learning allows collaborative workers to solve a machine learning problem while preserving data privacy. Recent studies have tackled various challenges in federated learning, but the joint optimization of communication overhead, learning reliability, and deployment efficiency is still an open problem. To this end, we propose a new scheme named federated learning via plurality vote (FedVote). In each communication round of FedVote, workers transmit binary or ternary weights to the server with low communication overhead. The model parameters are aggregated via weighted voting to enhance the resilience against Byzantine attacks. When deployed for inference, the model with binary or ternary weights is resource-friendly to edge devices. We show that our proposed method can reduce quantization error and converges faster compared with the methods directly quantizing the model updates.
We consider a hierarchical edge-cloud architecture in which services are provided to mobile users as chains of virtual network functions. Each service has specific computation requirements and target delay performance, which require placing the corresponding chain properly and allocating a suitable amount of computing resources. Furthermore, chain migration may be necessary to meet the services' target delay, or convenient to keep the service provisioning cost low. We tackle such issues by formalizing the problem of optimal chain placement and resource allocation in the edge-cloud continuum, taking into account migration, bandwidth, and computation costs. Specifically, we first envision an algorithm that, leveraging resource augmentation, addresses the above problem and provides an upper bound to the amount of resources required to find a feasible solution. We use this algorithm as a building block to devise an efficient approach targeting the minimum-cost solution, while minimizing the required resource augmentation. Our results, obtained through trace-driven, large-scale simulations, show that our solution can provide a feasible solution by using half the amount of resources required by state-of-the-art alternatives.