Semantics-Aware Source Coding in Status Update Systems

Abstract: We consider a communication system in which the destination receives status updates from an information source that observes a physical process. The transmitter performs semantics-empowered filtering as a means to send only the most "important" samples to the receiver in a timely manner. As a first step, we explore a simple policy where the transmitter selects to encode only a fraction of the least frequent realizations of the observed random phenomenon, treating the remaining ones as not informative. For this timely source coding problem, we derive the optimal codeword lengths in the sense of maximizing a semantics-aware utility function and minimizing a quadratic average length cost. Our numerical results show the optimal number of updates to transmit for different arrival rates and encoding costs and corroborate that semantic filtering results in higher performance in terms of timely delivery of important updates.