Age of Information: An Indirect Way To Improve Control System Performance

Abstract

In this paper, we consider N heterogeneous control sub-systems sharing a wireless communication channel. Network resources are limited and they are allocated by a centralized scheduler. Each transmission is lost with a probability that is higher or lower depending on the portion each sub-system receives from the pool of network resources. Furthermore, state measurements go through a first come first serve (FCFS) Geo/Geo/1 transmission queue after they are generated by each sensor. In such a setting, the information at each remote controller that is observing the state measurements through the wireless channel gets outdated. Age of Information (AoI) captures this effect and measures the information freshness at each controller. By definition, AoI is control unaware thus not a standalone metric to capture the heterogeneous requirements of control sub-systems. However, we show how the stationary distribution of Age of information (AoI) can be employed as an intermediate metric to obtain the expected control performance in the network. As a result, we solve the resource allocation problem optimally and show by simulations that we are able to improve the control performance indirectly through AoI.