On the Value of Base Station Motion Knowledge for Goal-Oriented Remote Monitoring with Energy-Harvesting Sensors

TL;DR

This paper explores how knowledge of a mobile receiver's motion improves energy-harvesting sensor communication for remote monitoring, leading to significant reductions in estimation distortion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that models receiver mobility and channel dynamics as a Markov process, optimizing sampling and transmission policies via POMDP techniques.

Findings

Incorporating receiver mobility reduces average distortion by up to 42%.

Channel state information significantly improves monitoring performance.

The proposed approach outperforms baseline policies assuming stationary receivers.

Abstract

This paper investigates goal-oriented remote monitoring of an unobservable Markov source using energy-harvesting sensors that communicate with a mobile receiver, such as a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Unlike conventional systems that assume stationary base stations, the proposed framework explicitly accounts for receiver mobility, which induces time-varying channel characteristics modeled as a finite-state Markov process. The remote monitoring problem is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is transformed into a tractable belief-state MDP and solved using relative value iteration to obtain optimal sampling and transmission policies. Two estimation strategies are considered: Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Minimum Mean Distortion (MMD). Numerical results demonstrate that incorporating receiver mobility and channel state information into the optimization reduces the average distortion by 10% to 42% compared to baseline policies and constant-channel assumptions, highlighting the importance of base station motion knowledge for effective goal-oriented communication.