Age- and Deviation-of-Information of Signal-agnostic and Signal-aware Sensor Sampling in Networked Monitoring

We consider a system where a sensor is sampled and the samples are transmitted via a network subject to latency to a remote monitor. Typical examples are in networked control and networked cyber-physical systems in general. An important performance metric of such systems is the age-of-information, that quantifies the freshness of the sensor data at the remote monitor.

Generally, the aim is to find a sampling policy that minimizes the age-of-information. In time-triggered systems, samples are taken at certain points in time, thus the sampling is signal-agnostic. Signal-aware sampling applies to event-triggered systems, where a defined sensor event, e.g., if the change of the sensor signal exceeds a threshold, triggers the transmission of a new sample. In this project, we will consider age-related but signal-aware metrics that consider the actual deviation of the information at the remote monitor from the current sensor signal. We will develop signal-aware sampling policies and evaluate their deviation-of-information performance.