Beyond Freshness and Semantics: A Coupon-Collector Framework for Effective Status Updates
For status update systems operating over unreliable energy-constrained wireless channels, we address Weaver's long-standing Level-C question: do my packets actually improve the plant's behavior? Each fresh sample carries a stochastic expiration time -- governed by the plant's instability dynamics -- after which the information becomes useless for control. Casting the problem as a coupon-collector variant with expiring coupons, we (i) formulate a two-dimensional average-reward MDP, (ii) prove that the optimal schedule is doubly thresholded in the receiver's freshness timer and the sender's stored lifetime, (iii) derive a closed-form policy for deterministic lifetimes, and (iv) design a Str...
| Authors | Youssef Ahmed, Arnob Ghosh, Chih-Chun Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | eess.SY |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 March 2026 |
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