Age of Actuation in a Wireless Power Transfer System

Abstract: In this paper, we study a model relevant to semantics-aware goal-oriented communications. More specifically, observations from an external process are transmitted through status updates to a battery-powered receiver. From these updates, the receiver is informed about the status of the process and if there is sufficient energy, uses them to perform an actuation to achieve a goal. We consider a wireless power transfer model where the destination receives energy from a dedicated power transmitter and occasionally from the data transmitter. We provide the analysis for the Age of Information (AoI). Furthermore, we propose a new metric, namely the \textit{Age of Actuation (AoA) which is relevant when the receiver utilizes the status updates to perform actions in a timely manner}. We analytically characterize the AoA and we show that is a more general metric than AoI. We provide the optimization problems for both metrics, and we numerically evaluate our analytical results.