Guest Editorial Special Issue on Age of Information and Data Semantics for Sensing, Communication, and Control Co-Design in IoT

A typical Internet-of-Things (IoT) system consists of three major layers: 1) sensing; 2) communication; and 3) application (i.e., actuation and control) layers. The co-design of these layers has been studied for over two decades, dating back to the concept of communication, computing, and control, i.e., 3C, convergence in the 1990s. Nowadays, with the emergence of wireless-networked machine-type applications, such as connected autonomous driving and factory automation, this co-design is more urgently desired than ever to meet the stringent quality-of-service requirements thereof. To realize this goal, the 5G wireless network of today has mainly focused on the communication part and strived to reliably achieve low air-interface communication delay, i.e., ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (uRLLC). However, more and more wireless communications in IoT are based on status updates instead of general content delivery. The current uRLLC design is insufficient to characterize the status update quality, and thus is unable to optimize for timely status update with constrained wireless resources. Therefore, the performance of computing and control in IoT networks that rely highly on wireless communications is suboptimal.