# Context-Aware Information Lapse for Timely Status Updates in Remote Control Systems

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a context-aware metric called information lapse for remote control systems, improving the timeliness evaluation of status updates by considering source dynamics and importance, leading to better scheduling policies.

## Contribution

It proposes the novel context-aware information lapse metric and develops a Lyapunov-based scheduling policy to optimize status update timeliness in IoT remote control systems.

## Key findings

- The new metric captures both source evolution and importance of status.
- The proposed policy outperforms AoI-based approaches in error-threshold violations.
- Numerical results demonstrate improved control performance with the new method.

## Abstract

Emerging applications in Internet of Things (IoT), such as remote monitoring and control, extensively rely on timely status updates. Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to characterize the freshness of information in status update systems. However, it only considers the time elapsed since the generation of the latest packet, and is incapable of capturing other critical information in remote control systems, such as the stochastic evolution and the importance of the source status. In order to evaluate the timeliness of status updates in remote control systems, we propose a context-aware metric, namely the context-aware information lapse. The context-aware information lapse characterizes both the stochastic evolution of the source status and the context-aware importance of the status. In this paper, the minimization of average context-aware lapse in a multi-user system is considered, and a corresponding user scheduling policy is proposed based on Lyapunov optimization. Numerical results show that compared to AoI-based policy, the context-aware-lapse-based policy can achieve a substantial improvement in terms of error-threshold violation probability and control performance.