Guest Editorial Age of Information

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With the emergence of real-time cyberphysical systems, status updates are becoming an important form of communication. Vehicular messaging, security reports from homes and offices, surveillance video, and video feedback from remote-controlled systems all represent status updates at networked monitors that need to be as timely as possible. However, this is typically constrained by limited network resources. This tension has led to the introduction of new performance metrics based on the Age of Information (AoI) that capture how timely is one’s knowledge of an entity or process. Optimization based on AoI metrics of both the networks and the senders’ updating policies has yielded new and even surprising results.