Goal-Oriented Remote Tracking Through Correlated Observations in Pull-Based Communications

We address the real-time remote tracking problem in a status update system comprising two sensors, two independent information sources, and a remote monitor. The status updating follows a pull-based communication, where the monitor commands/pulls the sensors for status updates, i.e., the actual state of the sources. We consider that the observations are correlated, meaning that each sensor’s sent data could also include the state of the other source due to, e.g., inter-sensor communications or overlapping monitoring regions. The effectiveness of data communication is measured by a generic distortion, capturing the underlying application’s goal. We provide optimal command/pulling policies for the monitor that minimize the average weighted sum distortion and transmission cost. Since the monitor cannot fully observe the exact state of each source, we propose a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and reformulate it as a belief MDP problem. We then effectively truncate the infinite belief space and transform it into a finite-state MDP problem, which is solved via relative value iteration. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the derived policy over age-based and deep-Q network baseline policies.