Paper on timely communication networks receives best journal paper award

Dr Konstantinos Gatsis is a recipient of the prestigious 2023 IEEE Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, which recognizes outstanding papers that lie at the intersection of communications and information theory. Dr Gatsis’ paper ‘Age of Information in Random Access Channels’ was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in 2022, and is joint work with international collaborators Xingran Chen, Hamed Hassani, Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where Dr Gatsis previously held a postdoctoral researcher position.

The work is motivated by next generation communication networks that go beyond the traditional transfer of data between human users or computers, but additionally aim to support cyber-physical systems found in industrial automation, transportation systems, smart cities, and robotics. These time-sensitive application areas require a shift of focus from high data rate communication to communication that is also timely to enable real-time monitoring and decision-making tasks.

Timely communication is not always ensured by high-rate communication, and as a result the paper establishes decentralised mechanisms for timely transfer of information from a large number of users, relying on the recently proposed metric of Age-of-Information. The results advance the state of the art both with a theoretical analysis of optimal algorithms and with practical schemes. One of the conclusions is that it is beneficial to increase the sampling rate (and hence the arrival rate) at the users and transmit packets selectively based on their age. This is contrary to common practice where the arrival rate can be optimized to attain the minimum Age-of-Information.

Dr Gatsis joined the Department of Engineering Science in 2019 where he is a Departmental Lecturer and member of the Control Engineering Group. His expertise is in cyber-physical systems merging tools from control theory, communication, machine learning, and security. He says of the award, “It is a great honour to receive this award from this academic community and it feels particularly special as I am at an early stage in my career. This is a great recognition of the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective we took in this research effort. It is also a great motivation for me to continue research that lies at the intersection of different academic communities and that is necessary to advance the state-of-the-art in cyber-physical systems.”

The Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers that lie at the intersection of communications and information theory, from papers appearing in a ComSoc or IT Society publication during the previous three years. A Committee with members from both societies makes the selection.