Goal-Oriented Remote Tracking Through Correlated Observations in Pull-based Communications

Abstract

We address the real-time remote tracking problem in a status update system comprising two sensors, two independent information sources, and a remote monitor. The status updating follows a pull-based communication, where the monitor commands/pulls the sensors for status updates, i.e., the actual state of the sources. We consider that the observations are \textit{correlated}, meaning that each sensor's sent data could also include the state of the other source due to, e.g., inter-sensor communications or overlapping monitoring regions. The effectiveness of data communication is measured by a generic distortion, capturing the underlying application goal. We provide optimal command/pulling policies for the monitor that minimize the average weighted sum distortion and transmission cost. Since the monitor cannot fully observe the exact state of each source, we propose a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and reformulate it as a belief MDP problem. We then effectively truncate the infinite belief space and transform it into a finite-state MDP problem, which is solved via relative value iteration. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the derived policy over age-based and deep-Q network baseline policies.