A Switch to the Concern of User: Importance Coefficient in Utility Distribution and Message Importance Measure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a utility distribution model that captures user concern levels in communication systems by adjusting a parameter, linking message importance to user preferences and demonstrating its effectiveness through numerical results.

Contribution

It proposes a flexible utility distribution framework that extends message importance measure by incorporating user concern through a tunable parameter.

Findings

Utility distribution aligns with message importance measure.

Parameter controls user focus on high- or low-probability events.

Numerical results validate the utility distribution's effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper mainly focuses on the utilization frequency in receiving end of communication systems, which shows the inclination of the user about different symbols. When the average number of use is limited, a specific utility distribution is proposed on the best effort in term of fairness, which is also the closest one to occurring probability in the relative entropy. Similar to a switch, its parameter can be selected to make it satisfy different users' requirements: negative parameter means the user focus on high-probability events and positive parameter means the user is interested in small-probability events. In fact, the utility distribution is a measure of message importance in essence. It illustrates the meaning of message importance measure (MIM), and extend it to the general case by selecting the parameter. Numerical results show that this utility distribution characterizes the message importance like MIM and its parameter determines the concern of users.