Semantics-Empowered Communications Through the Age of Incorrect Information

In this paper, we introduce the Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) as an enabler for semantics-empowered communication, a newly advocated communication paradigm centered around data’s role and its usefulness to the communication’s goal. First, we shed light on how the traditional communication paradigm, with its role-blind approach to data, is vulnerable to performance bottlenecks. Next, we consider the problem of minimizing the average AoII in a transmitter-receiver pair scenario. We prove that the optimal transmission strategy is a randomized threshold policy, and we propose an algorithm that finds the optimal parameters. Finally, we implement our policy in a real-life application, and we showcase its performance advantages compared to both the error-optimal and the AoI-optimal policies.