Value of Information in Wireless Sensor Network Applications and the IoT: A Review

Abstract

Value of Information (VoI) is a concept to assess the usefulness of information for a specific goal, and has in the last decade experienced a growing interest also for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications and the Internet of Things (IoT). By making the value of information explicit in the form of VoI, WSN and IoT applications should be able to better assess which information to spend their constrained resources on. However, the definition of VoI is highly application-dependent, which has led to a fragmented understanding of VoI, and there is a lack of a comprehensive overview. In this structured review, we first categorize application use cases and examine what VoI is used for, and explore the different approaches to defining VoI. We then provide a well-structured and comprehensive discussion of the specific approaches used in the literature to determine VoI, together with examples of use cases. We categorize the different approaches to calculating VoI, describe their properties systematically and distinguish between observed VoI and expected VoI. We also discuss adaptive VoI approaches and point towards future directions within the field.

Goal-Oriented Scheduling in Sensor Networks With Application Timing Awareness

“…Another interesting development involves the modeling of the state of each sensor as a Markov chain, posing the polling problem as a POMDP [29] to identify sensors reporting abnormal values with the minimum energy expenditure [30]. For a more thorough review of the recent literature on VoI, we refer the reader to [31]. Semantic communication is a subject that is closely related to VoI, and has seen significant developments in the past few years: instead of a pre-defined value, information is evaluated and encoded based on meaning, which can only be derived implicitly, either from performance at a given task [32], [33] or by learning complex patterns in high-dimensional signals such as speech [34] or video [35].…”

Timely and Massive Communication in 6G: Pragmatics, Learning, and Inference

“…The value of information (VoI) considers the content of messages and not just their timing [12]. If the receiver has a known estimator, the value ν(t) of an update generated at time t is given by the difference its transmission would make in the error.…”

Resource Allocation in UAV-Assisted Wireless Powered Communication Networks for Urban Monitoring

“…1, we consider a STAR-RIS empowered WPB-MEC network comprising an HAP with N antennas, an MEC server with finite computing capability, a STAR-RIS with M elements, and K single-antenna WSs. The N antennas at the HAP are utilized for supporting the implementation of the FD mode in the downlink and efficient tasks receiving in the uplink 1 . Specifically, in the downlink, N antennas is utilized to transmit energy signals to recharge WSs, and the remaining N antennas is utilized to simultaneously receive offloaded tasks from WSs on the same frequency band, where N = N 2 .…”

“…As depicted in Fig. 2, the transmission block under consideration has a duration of T seconds and consists of four phases, i.e., passive offloading phase, active offloading phase, edge 1 The HAP is also utilized to undertake the control of network scheduling and task computations. As the HAP can be with stable energy supply and high computational capability, the task computations are implemented fast.…”

“…T He amount of wireless sensors (WSs) and tasks needed to be computed have drastically expanded with the ubiquitous applications of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies [1]. However, to control the manufacturing cost and physical size of WSs, their computing capabilities and battery capacities are generally limited.…”