Value of Updates: Which Packets Are Worth Transmitting?

In the context of control systems over a communication network, status updates can be discarded based on their content to unload the network and prevent network congestion. In this work, we propose a transport layer scheme that not only considers the current system state, but also its significance w.r.t already transmitted updates, including those that are not yet acknowledged. The benefit of admitting a packet to be sent is compared to its transmission cost to obtain the value of update (VoU). Using Zolertia Re-Mote sensors, we show that the consideration of VoU allows improving the control performance by at least 70%.