# Urgency of Information for Context-Aware Timely Status Updates in Remote Control Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.07987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Effective Communication with Dynamic Feature Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16236/) (2024)
- [Semantic-Aware Remote Estimation of Multiple Markov Sources Under Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16855/) (2024)
- [Semantic and Effective Communication for Remote Control Tasks with Dynamic Feature Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05901/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Pragmatic Communication and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14399/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Remote Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07555/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Version Age of Information Scheduling: Average and Tail-Risk-Sensitive Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18069/) (2026)
- [Monitoring State Transitions in Markovian Systems with Sampling Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22327/) (2025)
- [Timeliness-Oriented Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Multi-Region Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04542/) (2026)
- [Beyond Freshness and Semantics: A Coupon-Collector Framework for Effective Status Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26998/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As 5G and Internet-of-Things (IoT) are deeply integrated into vertical industries such as autonomous driving and industrial robotics, timely status update is crucial for remote monitoring and control. In this regard, Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to measure the freshness of status updates. However, it is just a metric changing linearly with time and irrelevant of context-awareness. We propose a context-based metric, named as Urgency of Information (UoI), to measure the nonlinear time-varying importance and the non-uniform context-dependence of the status information. This paper first establishes a theoretical framework for UoI characterization and then provides UoI-optimal status updating and user scheduling schemes in both single-terminal and multi-terminal cases. Specifically, an update-index-based scheme is proposed for a single-terminal system, where the terminal always updates and transmits when its update index is larger than a threshold. For the multi-terminal case, the UoI of the proposed scheduling scheme is proven to be upper-bounded and its decentralized implementation by Carrier Sensing Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) is also provided. In the simulations, the proposed updating and scheduling schemes notably outperform the existing ones such as round robin and AoI-optimal schemes in terms of UoI, error-bound violation and control system stability.