Neuroscheduling for Remote Estimation

Abstract: Many modern distributed systems consist of devices that generate more data than what can be transmitted via a communication link in near real time with high-fidelity. We consider the scheduling problem in which a device has access to multiple data sources, but at any moment, only one of them is revealed in real-time to a remote receiver. Even when the sources are Gaussian, and the fidelity criterion is the mean squared error, the globally optimal data selection strategy is not known. We propose a data-driven methodology to search for the elusive optimal solution using linear function approximation approach called neuroscheduling and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimal scheduler to not over fit training data. Additionally, we present several numerical results that show that the globally optimal scheduler and estimator pair to the Gaussian case are nonlinear.