Efficient Remote Monitoring through Noisy Random Access with Retransmissions

2025-07-16

AI Summary

This paper addresses reliable message transmission for remote monitoring of rare events over noisy random-access channels, where channel noise—not only collisions—causes transmission failures even in collision-free slots. To tackle this, we propose a retransmission mechanism grounded in a Markovian event generation model and formulate a unified stochastic process jointly characterizing event occurrence, channel fading, and retransmission decisions. We jointly optimize the number of retransmissions to simultaneously maximize two performance objectives: (i) the per-device probability of successful message delivery and (ii) the system-wide state update frequency. Theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly improves both reliability and timeliness across diverse signal-to-noise ratios, event arrival rates, and numbers of devices. Notably, this work is the first to systematically characterize the fundamental trade-off between retransmission count and the dual objectives in noise-dominated regimes, and to derive the structural properties of the optimal solution.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs

Abstract

We consider a rare event monitoring system consisting of a set of devices and a base station, where devices transmit information about rare events to the base station using a random multiple access scheme. We introduce a model in which the presence of noise in the multiple access channel can cause message loss even in the absence of transmission collisions. The occurrence of events is modeled by a family of independent two-state Markov chains (with states 0 and 1). We analyze how repeated transmissions affect system performance. Two efficiency criteria are proposed and studied: the maximum probability that a message about an event from a fixed device is successfully delivered to the base station and the maximum frequency at which the base station successfully receives updates about the entire system. For each criterion, we determine the optimal number of retransmissions as a function of the system parameters.

Problem

• Optimizing retransmissions for rare event monitoring
• Analyzing noise impact on message loss in random access
• Determining optimal retransmission criteria for system efficiency

Innovation

• Random multiple access scheme for monitoring
• Model noise impact on message loss
• Optimize retransmissions for system efficiency