The traditional maximalist approach to designing communication systems is increasingly misaligned with today’s evolving connectivity demands. Cyber-physical systems require a shift toward real-time multimodal communication, autonomous decision-making, and efficient distributed processing. The goal-oriented semantic communication paradigm offers a minimalist alternative by prioritizing the relevance and impact of exchanged information, which enhances effectiveness while reducing resource consumption by acquiring, transmitting, and receiving only the most pertinent information according to the goal of data exchange. Consequently, this paradigm presents a forward-thinking solution to modern communication challenges, balancing effectiveness with efficiency.
This thesis targets the challenges of incorporating goal-oriented effectiveness into status update systems, where a sensing side observes a source and transmits status updates to an actuation side. As a foundation, we introduce a framework for evaluating effectiveness at multiple granularity levels and propose a grade of effectiveness metric, which serves as a cornerstone throughout this thesis. We then explore broader challenges such as effect-aware filtering and encoding, the timing and scheduling of updates, and determining which information to exchange.
