ECE Faculty Emeritus Roy Yates, our distinguished colleague, will receive one of the two 2026 INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Awards in May this year!
The relevant paper is from INFOCOM 2016:
Yin Sun, Elif Uysal-Biyikoglu, Roy Yates, C. Emre Koksal, Ness B. Shroff
Update or Wait: How to Keep Your Data Fresh
The full version of the work appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in November 2017.
This paper shows a rather counterintuitive phenomenon. Suppose you have a monitor which wants to track a system’s state. The sensor which measures the state can send updates about the state to the monitor over a communication link which incurs some additional delay. The Age of Information (AoI) measures how “stale” the information the monitor has about the state. You might think that the sensor should send an update as soon as the state changes. However, delay and staleness are not the same: it turns out that sending a “hot-off-the-press” can be suboptimal: a optimal strategy can be to wait a little bit before sending the update. The reason for this is that unlike systems which communicate data where all packets are equally important, if you are sending status updates a packet is only useful if it’s carrying fresh information.
