Data Acquisition for Real-Time Decision-Making under Freshness Constraints

—The paper describes a novel algorithm for timely sensor data retrieval in resource-poor environments under freshness constraints. Consider a civil unrest, national security, or disaster management scenario, where a dynamic situation evolves and a decision-maker must decide on a course of action in view of latest data. Since the situation changes, so is the best course of action. The scenario offers two interesting constraints. First, one should be able to successfully compute the course of action within some appropriate time window, which we call the decision deadline. Second, at the time the course of action is computed, the data it is based on must be fresh (i.e., within some corresponding validity interval). We call it the freshness constraint. These constraints create an interesting novel problem of timely data retrieval. We address this problem in resourcescarce environments, where network resource limitations require that data objects (e.g., pictures and other sensor measureme...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: RTSS
• Authors: Shaohan Hu, Shuochao Yao, Haiming Jin, Yiran Zhao, Yitao Hu, Xiaochen Liu, Nooreddin Naghibolhosseini, Shen Li, Akash Kapoor, William Dron, Lu Su, Amotz Bar-Noy, Pedro Szekely, Ramesh Govindan, Reginald Hobbs, Tarek F. Abdelzaher
• Keywords: Control Systems, RTSS 2015