How to Quantify Packet Importance for Real-Time Control: A Feature-Oriented Perspective

Fueled by ubiquitous connectivity, packets are expected to be timely updated to the controller of interest in real-time control systems. Recently, the Age of Information (AoI) becomes a popular metric to quantify the packet importance, which improves the efficiency of communication resource utilization. However, it is analyzed only from the information freshness perspective, losing sight of considering feature data. In light of this, we first establish a feature-oriented teleoperation framework to quantify the packet importance, derived from the information bottleneck principle. Under this framework, a packet management method is proposed to increase the average feature quantity of the receiver. Finally, we build a prototype to deploy the proposed method, and the results show superiority in reducing both the communication traffic and the control error.