Real Time Monitoring of Brownian Motions

Abstract

Real-time monitoring has received considerable attention recently due to its potential in automatic driving, tele-surgery, and factory automation in the 6G era. In remote estimation or reconstruction of stochastic processes, the statistical properties of stochastic processes to be monitored play a central role. Among the stochastic processes interested by real-time applications, the Brownian motion, also known as the Wiener processes is a typical one. In this paper, we are interested in how to monitor Brownian motions efficiently, timely, and reliably. To achieve this goal, we reveal that the real-time estimation error is jointly determined by the quantization error and freshness of data samples. Based on this observation, we present an optimal joint sampling and quantization scheme that efficiently balances the quantization distortion and the age-of-information (AoI). Furthermore, we find that the error accumulation will lead to infinite distortion as monitoring time increases. To overcome this, a multi-layer error correction method is presented for infinite-time monitoring, in which bounded distortion can be achieved with limited data rate. Finally, to conquer the accumulation of transmission errors in unreliable channels, we present an error correction mechanism based on periodic feedback. Diffusion approximation is then adopted to determine the optimal feedback rate and interval.