Age of Incorrect Information under Delay

TL;DR

This paper studies how to minimize the Age of Incorrect Information in a system with random communication delays by deriving an optimal transmission policy using Markov Decision Processes.

Contribution

It characterizes the AoII minimization problem with random delays and proves the optimal policy structure under general delay distributions.

Findings

Optimal policy is to transmit when channel is idle and AoII is non-zero.

The problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process.

Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the optimal policy.

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of minimizing the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) when the communication channel has a random delay. We consider a slotted-time system where a transmitter observes a dynamic source and decides when to send updates to a remote receiver through a channel with random delay. The receiver maintains estimates of the state of the dynamic source based on the received updates. In this paper, we adopt AoII as the performance metric and investigate the problem of optimizing the transmitter's action in each time slot to minimize AoII. We first characterize the considered problem using Markov Decision Process (MDP). Then, leveraging the policy improvement theorem and under an easy-to-verify condition, we prove that the optimal decision for the transmitter is to initiate a transmission whenever the channel is idle and AoII is not zero. The results apply to generic delay distribution. Lastly, we verify the condition numerically and provide the numerical results that highlight the performance of the optimal policy.