arXiv subjects

Elif Uysal

Publications and source records attributed to Elif Uysal.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

In-Orbit Intelligence or Ground Offloading? Inference Freshness under Intermittent Satellite Connectivity

This paper studies how to balance onboard and ground computation under intermittent LEO connectivity for optimized inference freshness. As connectivity varies in time, the system switches among the actions of onboard computation, cached semantic transmission, raw-data offloading, and waiting. We define Age of Inference (AoInf) as the performance metric, where the age resets only upon successful task-valid updates. We formulate long-run average AoInf minimization as a finite-state average-cost semi-Markov decision process whose state captures the ground AoInf, orbital contact phase, cache occupancy, and cache age. We then transform the SMDP into an equivalent average-cost MDP and compute the solution via normalized relative value iteration (RVI). Numerical results indicate that the resulting hybrid policy reduces average AoInf relative to onboard-only and offload-only baselines, while requiring less computational resources on the satellite than the former, and fewer communication resources than the latter.

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arXiv2026

Age of Information in Time-Varying Multi-Priority Queues

In networks with intermittent connectivity, such as mobile, aerial, and space systems, maintaining information freshness is complicated by time-varying arrivals, service disruptions, and interactions among traffic classes with different priorities. To capture these effects, we study a multi-priority single-server queue with time-varying arrivals and service rates under intermittent connectivity. Our main result shows that an appropriately selected collection of state-conditioned first moments closes exactly, leading to a finite-dimensional linear time-periodic Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) system for the mean Age of Information (AoI) and mean Peak Age of Information (PAoI) of each priority class. For periodic arrival and service rates, we define a one-period state map by propagating the ODE over a single period, and use the periodicity condition to formulate the periodic steady state as a fixed point of this map. We then propose a fixed-point iteration algorithm and prove its convergence to the unique periodic steady state (PSS). Numerical results reveal that high-priority traffic can strongly reshape the service process seen by lower-priority classes.

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arXiv2026

ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control

Satellite Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables massive status-update services beyond terrestrial coverage, but grant-free uplink access creates a coupled freshness-control problem: increasing repetition and receiver-side diversity improves a device's capture-SIC opportunities, yet the resulting population congestion degrades network-wide freshness. Existing AoI-aware random-access models often rely on slot-synchronous collisions, fixed delivery probabilities, or scalar transmit-or-wait decisions and therefore cannot capture asynchronous satellite uplinks with capture and SIC. This paper develops a PHY-aware mean-field framework, termed ASTRA (Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access), for freshness-driven satellite IoT random access. We build an access model that captures asynchronous arrivals, partial overlaps, capture, and SIC while preserving the dependence of delivery success on each device's repetition-diversity action. We then formulate the population interaction as a scalable mean-field MDP in which devices optimize access timing and intensity using only local AoI observations. The resulting system admits a mean-field equilibrium in which individual optimality and endogenous congestion are mutually consistent. We further prove that the optimal equilibrium policy admits an age-threshold structure. Numerical results show that the proposed policy reduces AoI relative to age-independent baselines.

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arXiv2026

Goal-Oriented Status Updating for Real-time Remote Inference over Networks with Two-Way Delay

We study a setting where an intelligent model (e.g., a pre-trained neural network) infers the real-time value of a target signal using data samples transmitted from a remote source. The transmission scheduler decides (i) the freshness of packets, (ii) their length (i.e., the number of samples they contain), and (iii) when they should be transmitted. The freshness is quantified using the Age of Information (AoI), and the inference quality for a given packet length is a general function of AoI. Previous works assumed i.i.d. transmission delays with immediate feedback or were restricted to the case where inference performance degrades as the input data ages. Our formulation, in addition to capturing non-monotone age dependence, also covers Markovian delay on both forward and feedback links. We model this as an infinite-horizon average-cost Semi-Markov Decision Process. We obtain a closed-form solution that decides on (i) and (iii) for any constant packet length. The solution for when to transmit is an index-based threshold policy, where the index function is expressed in terms of the delay state and AoI at the receiver. In contrast, the freshness of the selected packet is a function of only the delay state. We then separately optimize the value of the constant packet length. Moreover, we also develop an index-based threshold policy for the time-variable packet length case, which allows a complexity reduction. In simulation results, we observe that our goal-oriented scheduler drops inference error down to one-sixth with respect to the age-based scheduling of unit-length packets.

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arXiv2026

Age Optimal Sampling and Routing under Intermittent Links and Energy Constraints

Links in practical systems, such as satellite--terrestrial integrated networks, exhibit distinct delay distributions, intermittent availability, and heterogeneous energy costs. These characteristics pose significant challenges to maintaining timely and energy-efficient status updates. While link availability restricts feasible transmission routes, routing decisions determine the actual delay and energy expenditure. This paper tackles these challenges by jointly optimizing sampling and routing decisions to minimize monotonic, non-linear Age of Information (AoI). The proposed formulation incorporates key system features, including multiple routes with correlated random delays, stochastic link availability, and route-dependent energy consumption. We model the problem as an infinite-horizon Constrained Semi-Markov Decision Process (CSMDP) with a hybrid state--action space and develop an efficient nested algorithm, termed Bisec-\textsc{ReaVI}, to solve this problem. We analyze the structural properties of the solution and reveal a well-defined jointly optimal policy structure: (i) For general monotonic penalty functions, the optimal sampling policy is a piecewise linear waiting policy with at most $N$ breakpoints given $N$ routes; and (ii) under a derived Expected Penalty Ordering condition, the optimal routing policy is a monotonic threshold-based handover policy characterized by at most $\binom{N}{2}$ thresholds. Numerical experiments in a \textit{satellite--terrestrial} integrated routing scenario demonstrate that the proposed scheme efficiently balances energy usage and information freshness, and reveal a counter-intuitive insight: \textit{even routes with higher average delay, higher delay variance or lower availability can still play a critical role in minimizing monotonic functions of AoI}.

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arXiv2026

Taming the Heavy Tail: Age-Optimal Preemption

This paper studies a continuous-time joint sampling-and-preemption problem, incorporating sampling and preemption penalties under general service-time distributions. We formulate the system as an impulse-controlled piecewise-deterministic Markov process (PDMP) and derive coupled integral average-cost optimality equations via the dynamic programming principle, thereby avoiding the smoothness assumptions typically required for an average-cost Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman quasi-variational inequality (HJB-QVI) characterization. A key invariance in the busy phase collapses the dynamics onto a one-dimensional busy-start boundary, reducing preemption control to an optimal stopping problem. Building on this structure, we develop an efficient policy iteration algorithm with heavy-tail acceleration, employing a hybrid (uniform/log-spaced) action grid and a far-field linear closure. Simulations under Pareto and log-normal service times demonstrate substantial improvements over AoI-optimal non-preemptive sampling and zero-wait baselines, achieving up to a 30x reduction in average cost in heavy-tailed regimes. Finally, simulations uncover a counterintuitive insight: under preemption, delay variance, despite typically being a liability, can become a strategic advantage for information freshness.

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arXiv2025

Optimal Sampling and Scheduling for Remote Fusion Estimation of Correlated Wiener Processes

In distributed sensor networks, sensors often observe a dynamic process within overlapping regions. Due to random delays, these correlated observations arrive at the fusion center asynchronously, raising a central question: How can one fuse asynchronous yet correlated information for accurate remote fusion estimation? This paper addresses this challenge by studying the joint design of sampling, scheduling, and estimation policies for monitoring a correlated Wiener process. Though this problem is coupled, we establish a separation principle and identify the joint optimal policy: the optimal fusion estimator is a weighted-sum fusion estimator conditioned on Age of Information (AoI), the optimal scheduler is a Maximum Age First (MAF) scheduler that prioritizes the most stale source, and the optimal sampling can be designed given the optimal estimator and the MAF scheduler. To design the optimal sampling, we show that, under the infinite-horizon average-cost criterion, optimizing AoI is equivalent to optimizing MSE under pull-based communications, despite the presence of strong inter-sensor correlations. This structural equivalence allows us to identify the MSE-optimal sampler as one that is AoI-optimal. This result underscores an insight: information freshness can serve as a design surrogate for optimal estimation in correlated sensing environments.

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arXiv2025

Goal-Oriented Random Access (GORA)

We propose Goal-Oriented Random Access (GORA), where transmitters jointly optimize what to send and when to access the shared channel to a common access point, considering the ultimate goal of the information transfer at its final destination. This goal is captured by an objective function, which is expressed as a general (not necessarily monotonic) function of the Age of Information. Our findings reveal that, under certain conditions, it may be desirable for transmitters to delay channel access intentionally and, when accessing the channel, transmit aged samples to reach a specific goal at the receiver.

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arXiv2025

A$^3$L-FEC: Age-Aware Application Layer Forward Error Correction Flow Control

Age of Information (AoI) is a metric and KPI that has been developed for measuring and controlling data freshness. Optimization of AoI in a real-life network requires adapting the rate and timing of transmissions to varying network conditions. The vast majority of previous research on the control of AoI has been theoretical, using idealized models that ignored certain implementation aspects. As such, there is still a gap between the research on AoI and real-world protocols. In this paper we present an effort toward closing this gap by introducing an age-aware flow control algorithm. The algorithm, Age-Aware Application Layer Forward Error Correction (A$^3$L-FEC), is a packet generation mechanism operating on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The purpose is to control the peak Age of the end-to-end packet flow, specifically to reduce the rate of so-called "Age Violations," i.e., events where the peak age exceeds a given threshold. Evaluations in Mininet-WiFi and MATLAB indicate that A$3$L-FEC reduces age violations compared to two related protocols in the literature, namely TCP-BBR and ACP+.

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arXiv2025

Optimal Sampling under Cost for Remote Estimation of the Wiener Process over a Channel with Delay

We address the optimal sampling of a Wiener process under sampling and transmission costs, with the samples being forwarded to a remote estimator over a channel with IID delay. The goal of the estimator is to reconstruct the real-time signal by minimizing a long-term average cost that includes both the mean squared estimation error (MSE) and the costs associated with sampling and transmission from causally received samples. Rather than pursuing the conventional MMSE estimate, our objective is to derive a policy that optimally balances estimation accuracy and resource expenditure, yielding an MSE-optimal solution under explicit cost constraints. We look for optimal online strategies for both sampling and transmission. By employing Lagrange relaxation and iterative backward induction, we derive an optimal policy that balances the trade-offs between estimation accuracy and costs. We validate our approach through comprehensive simulations, evaluating various scenarios including balanced costs, high sampling costs, high transmission costs, and different transmission delay statistics. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed joint sampling and transmission policy in maintaining lower MSE compared to conventional periodic sampling methods. The differences are particularly striking under high delay variability. We also analyze the convergence behavior of the cost function. We believe our formulation and results provide insights into the design and implementation of efficient remote estimation systems in stochastic networks.

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arXiv2024

Goal-Oriented Communications for Interplanetary and Non-Terrestrial Networks

The recent surge in satellite connectivity and deep space exploration calls for scalable communication network architectures that can effectively support increasing numbers of bursty flows, such as those occurring in remote monitoring and in-orbit computation. Yet communications over space links face challenges beyond delay alone: a contact window is a rare chance, and it can be wasted by data that loses task value before feedback returns. This article presents a goal-oriented networking framework for SpaceNets, organized around a common question: will the information still matter when it arrives? The framework has three pillars: (1) goal-oriented sampling and scheduling that can handle highly variable delay processes with memory, (2) grant-free access policies replacing exogenous arrivals with goal-oriented traffic shaping, and (3) flow-control and routing mechanisms that rank, reprocess, forward, or discard packets/bundles according to goal-oriented metrics at intermediate relays. Together, these mechanisms form a store-compute-forward perspective in which application goals guide protocol-level decisions across sampling, access, and relay operation.

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arXiv2024

Goal-Oriented Communications for Remote Inference under Two-Way Delay with Memory

We study the design of a goal-oriented sampling and scheduling strategy through a channel with highly variable two-way random delay, which can exhibit memory (e.g., Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks). The objective of the communication is to optimize the performance of remote inference, where an inference algorithm (e.g., a trained neural network) on the receiver side predicts a time-varying target signal using the data samples transmitted by a sensor. Previous formulations to this problem either assumed a channel with IID transmission delay, neglecting feedback delay, or considered the monotonic relation that the performance only gets worse as the input information ages. We show how, with delayed feedback, one can effectively exploit the knowledge about delay memory through an index-based threshold policy. This policy minimizes the expected time-average inference error that can be monotone or non-monotone in age. The index function is expressed in terms of the Age of Information (AoI) on the receiver side and a parameter regarding the distribution of subsequent transmission delay, both of which can readily be tracked.

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arXiv2023

Optimization of AoII and QAoII in Multi-User Links

We consider a network with multiple sources and a base station that send time-sensitive information to remote clients. The Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) captures the freshness of the informative pieces of status update packets at the destinations. We derive the closed-form Whittle Index formulation for a push-based multi-user network over unreliable channels with AoII-dependent cost functions. We also propose a new semantic performance metric for pull-based systems, named the Age of Incorrect Information at Query (QAoII), that quantifies AoII at particular instants when clients generate queries. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Whittle Index-based scheduling policies for both AoII and QAoII-dependent cost functions are superior to benchmark policies, and adopting query-aware scheduling can significantly improve the timeliness for scenarios where a single user or multiple users are scheduled at a time.

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arXiv2022

Semantic Communications in Networked Systems: A Data Significance Perspective

We present our vision for a departure from the established way of architecting and assessing communication networks, by incorporating the semantics of information for communications and control in networked systems. We define semantics of information, not as the meaning of the messages, but as their significance, possibly within a real time constraint, relative to the purpose of the data exchange. We argue that research efforts must focus on laying the theoretical foundations of a redesign of the entire process of information generation, transmission and usage in unison by developing: advanced semantic metrics for communications and control systems; an optimal sampling theory combining signal sparsity and semantics, for real-time prediction, reconstruction and control under communication constraints and delays; semantic compressed sensing techniques for decision making and inference directly in the compressed domain; semantic-aware data generation, channel coding, feedback, multiple and random access schemes that reduce the volume of data and the energy consumption, increasing the number of supportable devices.

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arXiv2021

MiSTA: An Age-Optimized Slotted ALOHA Protocol

We introduce Mini Slotted Threshold ALOHA (MiSTA), a slotted ALOHA modification designed to minimize the network-wide time average Age of Information (AoI). In MiSTA, sources whose ages are below a certain threshold stay silent. When a node with age above the threshold has data to send, it becomes active in the next time frame with a certain probability. The active node first transmits a short control sequence in a mini-slot ahead of actual data transmission, and if collision is sensed, it backs off with a certain probability. We derive the steady state distribution of the number of active sources and analyze its limiting behaviour. We show that MiSTA probabilistically converges to a "thinned" slotted ALOHA, where the number of active users at steady state adjusts to optimize age. With an optimal selection of parameters, MiSTA achieves an AoI scaling with the number of sources, n, as 0.9641n, which is an improvement over the Threshold ALOHA policy proposed earlier (for which the lowest possible scaling is 1.4169n). While achieving this reduction in age, MiSTA also increases achievable throughput to approximately 53%, from the 37% achievable by Threshold ALOHA and regular slotted ALOHA.

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arXiv2021

Pull or Wait: How to Optimize Query Age of Information

We study a pull-based status update communication model where a source node submits update packets to a channel with random transmission delay, at times requested by a remote destination node. The objective is to minimize the average query-age-of-information (QAoI), defined as the average age-of-information (AoI) measured at query instants that occur at the destination side according to a stochastic arrival process. In reference to a push-based problem formulation defined in the literature where the source decides to \textit{update or wait} at will, with the objective of minimizing the time average AoI at the destination, we name this problem the \textit{Pull-or-Wait} (PoW) problem. We provide a comparison of the two formulations: (i) Under Poisson query arrivals, an optimal policy that minimizes the time average AoI also minimizes the average QAoI, and these minimum values are equal; and (ii) the optimal average QAoI under periodic query arrivals is always less than or equal to the optimal time average AoI. We identify the PoW problem in the case of a single query as a stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem with uncountable state and action spaces, which has been not solved in previous literature. We derive an optimal solution for this SSP problem and use it as a building block for the solution of the PoW problem under periodic query arrivals.

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arXiv2021

Evaluation of Age Control Protocol (ACP) and ACP+ on ESP32

Age Control Protocol (ACP) and its enhanced version, ACP+, are recently proposed transport layer protocols to control Age of Information of data flows. This study presents an experimental evaluation of ACP and ACP+ on the ESP32 microcontroller, a currently popular IoT device. We identify several issues related to the implementation of these protocols on this platform and in general on short-haul, low-delay connections. We propose solutions to overcome these issues in the form of simple modifications to ACP+, and compare the performance of the resulting modified ACP+ with that of the original protocols on a small-delay local wireless IoT connection.

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arXiv2021

Age of Information in Practice

While age of Information (AoI) has gained importance as a metric characterizing the fresh-ness of information in information-update systems and time-critical applications, most previous studies on AoI have been theoretical. In this chapter, we compile a set of recent works reporting API measurements in real-life networks and experimental testbeds, and investigating practical issues such as synchronization, the role of various transport layer protocols, congestion control mechanisms, application of machine learning for adaptation to network conditions, and device related bottlenecks such as limited processing power.

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