arXiv subjects

Nikolaos Pappas

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolaos Pappas.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Version Age of Information Minimization over Fading Broadcast Channels

We consider a base station (BS) that receives version update packets from multiple exogenous streams and broadcasts them to corresponding users over a fading broadcast channel using a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. Sequentially indexed packets arrive randomly in each stream, with new packets making the previous ones obsolete. In this case, we consider the version age of information (VAoI) at a user, defined as the difference in the version index of the latest available packet at the BS and that at the user, as a metric of freshness of information. Our objective is to minimize a weighted sum of average VAoI across users subject to an average power constraint at the BS by optimally scheduling the update packets from various streams for transmission and transmitting them with sufficient powers to guarantee their successful delivery. We consider the class of channel-only stationary randomized policies (CO-SRP), which rely solely on channel power gains for transmission decisions. We solve the resulting non-convex problem optimally and show that the VAoI achieved under the optimal CO-SRP is within twice the optimal achievable VAoI. We also obtained a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP)-based solution and its structural properties. Numerical simulations show a close performance between the optimal CO-SRP and CMDP-based solutions. Additionally, a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, which allows transmission to at most one user at a time, matches NOMA's performance under tight average power constraints. However, NOMA outperforms TDMA as the constraint is relaxed.

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arXiv2024

Version age-based client scheduling policy for federated learning

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm facilitating collaborative training across multiple clients without sharing local data. Despite advancements in edge device capabilities, communication bottlenecks present challenges in aggregating a large number of clients; only a portion of the clients can update their parameters upon each global aggregation. This phenomenon introduces the critical challenge of stragglers in FL and the profound impact of client scheduling policies on global model convergence and stability. Existing scheduling strategies address staleness but predominantly focus on either timeliness or content. Motivated by this, we introduce the novel concept of Version Age of Information (VAoI) to FL. Unlike traditional Age of Information metrics, VAoI considers both timeliness and content staleness. Each client's version age is updated discretely, indicating the freshness of information. VAoI is incorporated into the client scheduling policy to minimize the average VAoI, mitigating the impact of outdated local updates and enhancing the stability of FL systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Boosting Dynamic TDD in Small Cell Networks by the Multiplicative Weight Update Method

We leverage the Multiplicative Weight Update (MWU) method to develop a decentralized algorithm that significantly improves the performance of dynamic time division duplexing (D-TDD) in small cell networks. The proposed algorithm adaptively adjusts the time portion allocated to uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmissions at every node during each scheduled time slot, aligning the packet transmissions toward the most appropriate link directions according to the feedback of signal-to-interference ratio information. Our simulation results reveal that compared to the (conventional) fixed configuration of UL/DL transmission probabilities in D-TDD, incorporating MWU into D-TDD brings about a two-fold improvement of mean packet throughput in the DL and a three-fold improvement of the same performance metric in the UL, resulting in the D-TDD even outperforming Static-TDD in the UL. It also shows that the proposed scheme maintains a consistent performance gain in the presence of an ascending traffic load, validating its effectiveness in boosting the network performance. This work also demonstrates an approach that accounts for algorithmic considerations at the forefront when solving stochastic problems.

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arXiv2024

Version Innovation Age and Age of Incorrect Version for Monitoring Markovian Sources

In this paper, we propose two new performance metrics, coined the Version Innovation Age (VIA) and the Age of Incorrect Version (AoIV) for real-time monitoring of a two-state Markov process over an unreliable channel. We analyze their performance under the change-aware, semantics-aware, and randomized stationary sampling and transmission policies. We derive closed-form expressions for the distribution and the average of VIA, AoIV, and AoII for these policies. We then formulate and solve an optimization problem to minimize the average VIA, subject to constraints on the time-averaged sampling cost and time-averaged reconstruction error. Finally, we compare the performance of various sampling and transmission policies and identify the conditions under which each policy outperforms the others in optimizing the proposed metrics.

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arXiv2024

Age of Actuated Information and Age of Actuation in a Data-Caching Energy Harvesting Actuator

In this paper, we introduce two metrics, namely, age of actuation (AoA) and age of actuated information (AoAI), within a discrete-time system model that integrates data caching and energy harvesting (EH). AoA evaluates the timeliness of actions irrespective of the age of the information, while AoAI considers the freshness of the utilized data packet. We use Markov Chain analysis to model the system's evolution. Furthermore, we employ three-dimensional Markov Chain analysis to characterize the stationary distributions for AoA and AoAI and calculate their average values. Our findings from the analysis, validated by simulations, show that while AoAI consistently decreases with increased data and energy packet arrival rates, AoA presents a more complex behavior, with potential increases under conditions of limited data or energy resources. These metrics go towards the semantics of information and goal-oriented communications since they consider the timeliness of utilizing the information to perform an action.

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arXiv2024

Goal-Oriented Communication, Estimation, and Control over Bidirectional Wireless Links

We consider a wireless networked control system (WNCS) with bidirectional imperfect links for real-time applications such as smart grids. To maintain the stability of WNCS, captured by the probability that plant state violates preset values, at minimal cost, heterogeneous physical processes are monitored by multiple sensors. This status information, such as dynamic plant state and Markov Process-based context information, is then received/estimated by the controller for remote control. However, scheduling multiple sensors and designing the controller with limited resources is challenging due to their coupling, delay, and transmission loss. We formulate a Constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) to minimize violation probability with cost constraints. We reveal the relationship between the goal and different updating actions by analyzing the significance of information that incorporates goal-related usefulness and contextual importance. Subsequently, a goal-oriented deterministic scheduling policy is proposed. Two sensing-assisted control strategies and a control-aware estimation policy are proposed to improve the violation probability-cost tradeoff, integrated with the scheduling policy to form a goal-oriented co-design framework. Additionally, we explore retransmission in downlink transmission and qualitatively analyze its preference scenario. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed goal-oriented co-design policy outperforms previous work in simultaneously reducing violation probability and cost

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Age of Actuation and Timeliness: Semantics in a Wireless Power Transfer System

In this paper, we investigate a model relevant to semantics-aware goal-oriented communications, and we propose a new metric that incorporates the utilization of information in addition to its timelines. Specifically, we consider the transmission of observations from an external process to a battery-powered receiver through status updates. These updates inform the receiver about the process status and enable actuation if sufficient energy is available to achieve a goal. We focus on a wireless power transfer (WPT) model, where the receiver receives energy from a dedicated power transmitter and occasionally from the data transmitter when they share a common channel. We analyze the Age of Information (AoI) and propose a new metric, the \textit{Age of Actuation (AoA), which is relevant when the receiver utilizes the status updates to perform actions in a timely manner}. We provide analytical characterizations of the average AoA and the violation probability of the AoA, demonstrating that AoA generalizes AoI. Moreover, we introduce and analytically characterize the \textit{Probability of Missing Actuation (PoMA)}; this metric becomes relevant also \textit{to quantify the incurred cost of a missed action}. We formulate unconstrained and constrained optimization problems for all the metrics and present numerical evaluations of our analytical results. This proposed set of metrics goes beyond the traditional timeliness metrics since the synergy of different flows is now considered.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Value of Information and Timing-aware Scheduling for Federated Learning

Data possesses significant value as it fuels advancements in AI. However, protecting the privacy of the data generated by end-user devices has become crucial. Federated Learning (FL) offers a solution by preserving data privacy during training. FL brings the model directly to User Equipments (UEs) for local training by an access point (AP). The AP periodically aggregates trained parameters from UEs, enhancing the model and sending it back to them. However, due to communication constraints, only a subset of UEs can update parameters during each global aggregation. Consequently, developing innovative scheduling algorithms is vital to enable complete FL implementation and enhance FL convergence. In this paper, we present a scheduling policy combining Age of Update (AoU) concepts and data Shapley metrics. This policy considers the freshness and value of received parameter updates from individual data sources and real-time channel conditions to enhance FL's operational efficiency. The proposed algorithm is simple, and its effectiveness is demonstrated through simulations.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Optimizing Information Freshness over a Channel that Wears Out

A sensor samples and transmits status updates to a destination through a wireless channel that wears out over time and with every use. At each time slot, the sensor can decide to sample and transmit a fresh status update, restore the initial quality of the channel, or remain silent. The actions impose different costs on the operation of the system, and we study the problem of optimally selecting the actions at the transmitter so as to maximize the freshness of the information at the receiver, while minimizing the communication cost. Freshness is measured by the age of information (AoI). The problem is addressed using dynamic programming, and numerical results are presented to provide insights into the optimal transmission policy.

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arXiv2023

Pre-training Intent-Aware Encoders for Zero- and Few-Shot Intent Classification

Intent classification (IC) plays an important role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, IC models often generalize poorly when training without sufficient annotated examples for each user intent. We propose a novel pre-training method for text encoders that uses contrastive learning with intent psuedo-labels to produce embeddings that are well-suited for IC tasks, reducing the need for manual annotations. By applying this pre-training strategy, we also introduce Pre-trained Intent-aware Encoder (PIE), which is designed to align encodings of utterances with their intent names. Specifically, we first train a tagger to identify key phrases within utterances that are crucial for interpreting intents. We then use these extracted phrases to create examples for pre-training a text encoder in a contrastive manner. As a result, our PIE model achieves up to 5.4% and 4.0% higher accuracy than the previous state-of-the-art text encoder for the N-way zero- and one-shot settings on four IC datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Version Age-Optimal Cached Status Updates in a Gossiping Network with Energy Harvesting Sensor

In this work, we consider a real-time IoT monitoring system in which an energy harvesting sensor with a finite-size battery measures a physical process and transmits the status updates to an aggregator. The aggregator, equipped with caching capabilities, can serve the external requests of a destination network with either a stored update or a fresh update from the sensor. We assume the destination network acts as a gossiping network in which the update packets are forwarded among the nodes in a randomized setting. We utilize the Markov Decision Process framework to model and optimize the network's average Version Age of Information (AoI) and obtain the optimal policy at the aggregator. The structure of the optimal policy is analytically demonstrated and numerically verified. Numerical results highlight the effect of the system parameters on the average Version AoI. The simulations reveal the superior performance of the optimal policy compared to a set of baseline policies.

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arXiv2023

Optimal Status Updates for Minimizing Age of Correlated Information in IoT Networks with Energy Harvesting Sensors

Many real-time applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) need to deal with correlated information generated by multiple sensors. The design of efficient status update strategies that minimize the Age of Correlated Information (AoCI) is a key factor. In this paper, we consider an IoT network consisting of sensors equipped with the energy harvesting (EH) capability. We optimize the average AoCI at the data fusion center (DFC) by appropriately managing the energy harvested by sensors, whose true battery states are unobservable during the decision-making process. Particularly, we first formulate the dynamic status update procedure as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where the environmental dynamics are unknown to the DFC. In order to address the challenges arising from the causality of energy usage, unknown environmental dynamics, unobservability of sensors'true battery states, and large-scale discrete action space, we devise a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based dynamic status update algorithm. The algorithm leverages the advantages of the soft actor-critic and long short-term memory techniques. Meanwhile, it incorporates our proposed action decomposition and mapping mechanism. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm by comparing it with available DRL algorithms for POMDPs.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Analysis of Age of Information in Non-terrestrial Networks

Non-terrestrial networks (NTN), particularly low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks, have emerged as a promising solution to overcome the limitations of traditional terrestrial networks in the context of next-generation (6G) wireless systems. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the timeliness of information delivery in NTN through the concept of Age of Information (AoI). We propose an on-off process to approximate the service process between LEO satellites and a source node located on the Earth's surface. By utilizing stochastic geometry, we derive a closed-form expression for the time-average AoI in an NTN. This expression also applies to on-off processes with one component following an exponential distribution while the other has its probability density function supported on a bounded interval. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analysis and demonstrate the impact of source status update rate and satellite constellation density on the time-average AoI. Our work fills a gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of AoI in NTN and offers new insights into the performance of LEO satellite networks.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Conversation Style Transfer using Few-Shot Learning

Conventional text style transfer approaches focus on sentence-level style transfer without considering contextual information, and the style is described with attributes (e.g., formality). When applying style transfer in conversations such as task-oriented dialogues, existing approaches suffer from these limitations as context can play an important role and the style attributes are often difficult to define in conversations. In this paper, we introduce conversation style transfer as a few-shot learning problem, where the model learns to perform style transfer by observing only a few example dialogues in the target style. We propose a novel in-context learning approach to solve the task with style-free dialogues as a pivot. Human evaluation shows that by incorporating multi-turn context, the model is able to match the target style while having better appropriateness and semantic correctness compared to utterance/sentence-level style transfer. Additionally, we show that conversation style transfer can also benefit downstream tasks. For example, in multi-domain intent classification tasks, the F1 scores improve after transferring the style of training data to match the style of the test data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

State-aware Real-time Tracking and Remote Reconstruction of a Markov Source

The problem of real-time remote tracking and reconstruction of a two-state Markov process is considered here. A transmitter sends samples from an observed information source to a remote monitor over an unreliable wireless channel. The receiver, in turn, performs an action according to the state of the reconstructed source. We propose a state-aware randomized stationary sampling and transmission policy which accounts for the importance of different states of the information source, and their impact on the goal of the communication process. We then analyze the performance of the proposed policy, and compare it with existing goal-oriented joint sampling and transmission policies, with respect to a set of performance metrics. Specifically, we study the real-time reconstruction error, the cost of actuation error, the consecutive error, and a new metric, coined importance-aware consecutive error. In addition, we formulate and solve a constrained optimization problem that aims to obtain the optimal sampling probabilities that minimize the average cost of actuation error. Our results show that in the scenario of constrained sampling generation, the optimal state-aware randomized stationary policy outperforms all other sampling policies for fast evolving sources, and, under certain conditions, for slowly varying sources. Otherwise, a semantics-aware policy performs better only when the source is slowly varying.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Age of Information in Locally Adaptive Frame Slotted ALOHA

We consider a random access network consisting of source-destination pairs. Each source node generates status updates and transmits this information to its intended destination over a shared spectrum. The goal is to minimize the network-wide Age of Information (AoI). We develop a frame slotted ALOHA (FSA)-based policy for generating and transmitting status updates, where the frame size of each source node is adjusted according to its local environment. The proposed policy is of low complexity and can be implemented in a distributed manner. Additionally, it significantly improves the network AoI performance by (a) equalizing the update generation intervals at each source and (b) reducing interference across the network. Furthermore, we derive an analytical expression for the average network AoI attained for that policy. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme through simulations, which demonstrate that the locally adaptive FSA policy achieves a remarkable gain in terms of AoI compared to the slotted ALOHA counterpart, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Distortion Minimization with Age of Information and Cost Constraints

We consider a source monitoring a stochastic process with a transmitter to transmit timely information through a wireless ON/OFF channel to a destination. We assume that once the source samples the data, the sampled data has to be processed to identify the state of the stochastic process. The processing can take place either at the source before transmission or after transmission at the destination. The objective is to minimize the distortion while keeping the age of information (AoI) that measures the timeliness of information under a certain threshold. We use a stationary randomized policy (SRP) framework to solve the formulated problem. We show that the two-dimensional discrete-time Markov chain considering the AoI and instantaneous distortion as the state is lumpable and we obtain the expression for the expected AoI under the SRP.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Experimental Study of Transport Layer Protocols for Wireless Networked Control Systems

In Wireless Networked Control Systems (WNCSs), the feedback control loops are closed over a wireless communication network. The proliferation of WNCSs requires efficient network resource management mechanisms since the control performance is significantly affected by the impairments caused by network limitations. In conventional communication networks, the amount of transmitted data is one of the key performance indicators. In contrast, in WNCSs, the efficiency of the network is measured by its ability to facilitate control applications, and the data transmission rate should be limited to avoid network congestion. In this work, we consider an experimental setup where multiple control loops share a wireless communication network. Our testbed comprises up to five control loops that include Zolertia Re-Mote devices implementing IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We propose a novel relevance- and network-aware transport layer (TL) scheme for WNCSs. The proposed scheme admits the most important measurements for the control process into the network while taking current network conditions into account. Moreover, we propose a mechanism for the scheme parameters adaptation in dynamic scenarios with unknown network statistics. Unlike the conventional TL mechanisms failing to provide adequate control performance due to either congestion in the network or inefficient utilization of available resources, our method prevents network congestion while keeping the control performance high. We argue that relevance- and network-awareness are critical components of network protocol design to avoid control performance degradation in practice.

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