CIF: Small: Collaborative Research: On the Fundamental Nature of the Age of Updates


List of Personnel

Principle Investigator


Graduate Students


Undergraduate Students


Award Information

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation(NSF) under Grant CCF-1813050 from 1/1/18 -- 5/31/21. Awarded amount is $250,000.00 (Auburn part) + $241,283.00 (UMD part).

Project Goals and Activities

The Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a novel concept, metric, and tool in the broad area of Information Sciences. AoI is clearly connected to many aspects of Information Theory, Signal Processing, and multiple applications. However, the fundamental nature of this concept has been elusive so far. This project will investigate all three aspects of the AoI, namely its significance as a performance metric, its usefulness as a tool, and, more importantly, its potential to explore profound aspects of, and fundamental interconnections among, the theories that underlie our understanding of information structure, causal information processing, and the context (or semanteme) of information. Especially in the latter, the context of the communication process is emerging as a well-defined and useful extension of the Shannon doctrine of communication. Namely, communication needs not be just reproducing at point B a message selected at point A. Rather, it is important to consider whether communication occurs for a purpose, such as for computation, prediction, or monitoring. Educational efforts will include course development at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The investigators will also strengthen the strong programs of their Institutions in recruiting women and under-represented minorities, as well as the involvement of undergraduate students in research.

The proposed work aims at using the new concept of Age of Information to discover the relationships between Information Theory and Signal Processing, which are two of the main pillars of Information Science. Its foundational core is the context of communication, namely on the purposes and goals of signal transmission. This research will be carried out around three thrust areas: (i) the project will explore how the transmission and the age of received updates relate to the information structure of a signal, and understand how information ages over time; (ii) the project will use an innovative approach to the traditional problems of signal processing by relating Nyquist's theory to causal signal reconstruction; (iii) the project will use AoI as a tool in handling the problem of caching and network control in volatile environments (e.g., internet of things and sensor networks).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Age of Information Publications:

Book:
  1. Age of Information: A New Metric for Information Freshness
    Yin Sun, Igor Kadota, Rajat Talak, and Eytan Modiano
    Synthesis Lectures on Communication Networks, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2019. 2020 Auburn Author Award

Book Chanpter:
  1. Age of Information and Remote Estimation
    Tasmeen Zaman Ornee and Yin Sun
    A chapter in the book Age of Information: Foundations and Applications, 2021.

  2. Sampling and Scheduling for Minimizing Age of Information of Multiple Sources
    Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, Sastry Kompella, and Ness B. Shroff
    A chapter in the book Age of Information: Foundations and Applications, 2021.

Papers:
  1. Performance Bounds for Sampling and Remote Estimation of Gauss-Markov Processes over a Noisy Channel with Random Delay
    Tasmeen Zaman Ornee and Yin Sun
    IEEE SPAWC, 2021.

  2. Low-Power Status Updates via Sleep-Wake Scheduling
    Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, Rahul Singh, and Ness B. Shroff
    accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2021.

  3. Age of Information: An Introduction and Survey
    Roy D. Yates, Yin Sun, D. Richard Brown III, Sanjit K. Kaul, Eytan Modiano, and Sennur Ulukus
    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1183 - 1210, May 2021.

  4. Sampling and Remote Estimation for the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process through Queues:Age of Information and Beyond
    Tasmeen Zaman Ornee and Yin Sun
    accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2021.

  5. Minimizing Age of Information via Scheduling over Heterogeneous Channels
    Jiayu Pan, Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, and Ness Shroff
    ACM MobiHoc, 2021.

  6. The Age of Correlated Features in Supervised Learning based Forecasting
    Md Kamran Chowdhury Shisher, Heyang Qin, Lei Yang, Feng Yan, and Yin Sun
    IEEE INFOCOM Age of Information Workshop, 2021.

  7. Status Updates with Priorities: Lexicographic Optimality
    Ali Maatouk, Yin Sun, Anthony Ephremides, and Mohamad Assaad
    IEEE/IFIP WiOpt, 2020.

  8. On the Trackability of Stochastic Processes
    Baran Tan Bacinoglu, Yin Sun, and Elif Uysal
    IEEE ISIT, 2020.

  9. Optimizing Information Freshness using Low-Power Status Updates via Sleep-Wake Scheduling
    Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, Rahul Singh, and Ness B. Shroff
    ACM MobiHoc, 2020. Runner-up for Best Paper Award

  10. Scheduling and Power Allocation Dampens the Negative Effect of Channel Misreporting in Massive MIMO
    Zhanzhan Zhang, Yin Sun, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Zhiyong Chen, and Bin Xia
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2020.

  11. Balance Queueing and Retransmission: Latency-Optimal Massive MIMO Design
    Xu Du, Yin Sun, Ness Shroff, and Ashutosh Sabharwal
    IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 2293 - 2307, April, 2020.

  12. Optimal Sampling and Scheduling for Timely Status Updates in Multi-source Networks
    Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, Sastry Kompella, and Ness B. Shroff, 2020.

  13. Balance Queueing and Retransmission: Latency-Optimal Massive MIMO Design
    Xu Du, Yin Sun, Ness Shroff, and Ashutosh Sabharwal
    IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2019.

  14. Optimal Status Updating with a Finite-Battery Energy Harvesting Source
    Baran Tan Bacinoglu, Yin Sun, Elif Uysal, and Volkan Mutlu
    Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN) - special issue on Age of Information, 2019.

  15. Joint Queue-Aware and Channel-Aware Delay Optimal Scheduling of Arbitrarily Bursty Traffic Over Multi-State Time-Varying Channels
    Meng Wang, Juan Liu, Wei Chen, and Anthony Ephremides
    IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2019.

  16. On the Age of Information With Packet Deadlines
    Clement Kam, Sastry Kompella, Gam D. Nguyen, Jeffrey E. Wieselthier, and Anthony Ephremides
    IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2018.

  17. Age of Information and Throughput in a Shared Access Network with Heterogeneous Traffic
    Antzela Kosta, Nikolaos Pappas, Anthony Ephremides, and Vangelis Angelakis
    IEEE GLOBECOM, 2018.

  18. Dynamic Power Control for Packets with Deadlines
    Emmanouil Fountoulakis, Nikolaos Pappas, Qi Liao, Anthony Ephremides, and Vangelis Angelakis
    IEEE GLOBECOM, 2018.

  19. Optimal Link Scheduling for Age Minimization in Wireless Systems
    Qing He, Di Yuan, and Anthony Ephremides
    IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2018.

  20. The Age of Updates in a Simple Relay Network
    Ali Maatouk, Mohamad Assaad, and Anthony Ephremides
    IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2018.

  21. Towards an Effective Age Concept
    Clement Kam, Sastry Kompella, Gam D. Nguyen, Jeffrey E. Wieselthier, and Anthony Ephremides
    IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), 2018.

  22. The Age of Information in Multihop Networks
    Ahmed M Bedewy, Yin Sun, and Ness B. Shroff
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2019.

  23. Age-optimal Sampling and Transmission Scheduling in Multi-Source Systems
    Ahmed M Bedewy, Yin Sun, Sastry Kompella, and Ness B. Shroff
    ACM MobiHoc, 2019.

  24. Sampling for Remote Estimation through Queues: Age of Information and Beyond
    Tasmeen Zaman Ornee and Yin Sun
    IEEE WiOpt, 2019. Best Paper Award

  25. Sampling for Data Freshness Optimization: Non-linear Age Functions
    Yin Sun and Benjamin Cyr
    Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN) - special issue on Age of Information, 2019. 2021 JCN Best Paper Award

  26. Minimizing the Age of Information through Queues
    Ahmed M. Bedewy, Yin Sun, and Ness B. Shroff
    IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2019.

  27. Sampling of the Wiener Process for Remote Estimation over a Channel with Random Delay
    Yin Sun, Yury Polyanskiy, and Elif Uysal
    IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2019.