Utilizing the Perceived Age to Maximize Freshness in Query-Based Update Systems
Information Theory
2026-04-21 v2 Systems and Control
Systems and Control
math.IT
Abstract
Query-based sampling has become an increasingly popular technique for monitoring Markov sources in pull-based update systems. However, most of the contemporary literature on this assumes an exponential distribution for query delay and often relies on the assumption that the feedback or replies to the queries are instantaneous. In this work, we relax both of these assumptions and find optimal sampling policies for monitoring continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) under generic delay distributions. In particular, we show that one can obtain significant gains in terms of mean binary freshness (MBF) by employing a waiting based strategy for query-based sampling.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.14075,
title = {Utilizing the Perceived Age to Maximize Freshness in Query-Based Update Systems},
author = {Sahan Liyanaarachchi and Sennur Ulukus and Nail Akar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14075},
year = {2026}
}