控制性能不能只看平均信息年龄,分布差异影响极大。
When Mean Age Is Not Enough: Distribution-Aware Scheduling for Networked LQR Control

- 将调度间隔分布纳入优化,而非仅关注平均值。
- 相同均值下,不同分布导致跟踪代价差异可达40%以上。
- 适合关注网络控制设计的系统工程师和算法研究者。
信息年龄(AoI)已成为无线更新系统设计的核心指标,尤其在需要新鲜测量值进行追踪、估计和控制的应用中。尽管广泛使用,但以平均AoI或峰值AoI作为闭环性能代理,往往基于直觉而非控制理论推导。本文研究最小化平均AoI是否对网络化控制系统真正最优。针对具有延迟间歇更新的标量线性时不变系统,在状态无关调度策略下,无限时域LQR追踪问题简化为对调度间隔分布的优化。结果目标依赖于调度间隔过程的高阶统计矩,甚至在不稳定或相关情形下依赖指数矩,而不仅限于其均值。因此,相同平均AoI的策略可能引发显著不同的追踪成本。进一步分析了具有指数衰减自相关性的扰动,并推导出等价的成本表达式,揭示了完整间隔分布的作用。最后,利用来自NGSIM US-101数据集的真实车辆轨迹评估理论,实证结果与预测趋势一致,证明仅用平均AoI不足以支撑面向控制的网络设计。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Age of Information (AoI) has become a central metric for the design of wireless update systems, especially in applications where fresh measurements support tracking, estimation, and control. Despite its popularity, the use of mean AoI or peak AoI as a surrogate for closed-loop performance is often motivated by intuition rather than by a control-theoretic derivation. This paper examines whether minimizing the mean AoI is in fact optimal for networked control systems. For scalar linear time-invariant systems with delayed intermittent updates, we show that, under state-independent scheduling policies, the infinite-horizon LQR tracking problem reduces to an optimization over the distribution of inter-scheduling intervals. The resulting objective depends on higher-order statistical moments, and in unstable or correlated regimes on exponential moments, of the inter-scheduling process rather than only on its mean. Consequently, policies with identical mean AoI can induce substantially different tracking costs. We further extend the analysis to disturbances with exponentially decaying autocorrelation and derive equivalent cost formulations that expose the role of the full interval distribution. Finally, we evaluate the theory using real vehicle trajectories from the NGSIM US-101 dataset. The empirical results match the predicted performance trends, demonstrating that mean AoI alone is insufficient for control-oriented network design.
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