Relative Age of Information: Maintaining Freshness while Considering the Most Recently Generated Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of Relative Age of Information (AoI), a new metric that measures information freshness by considering the most recently arrived messages in a queueing system, enhancing traditional AoI analysis.

Contribution

It proposes a novel variation of AoI, called Relative AoI, which accounts for new message arrivals to better evaluate information freshness in queueing systems.

Findings

Defines Relative AoI as a new metric for information freshness.

Analyzes the impact of message arrivals on AoI.

Provides insights into maintaining data freshness in communication systems.

Abstract

A queueing system handling a sequence of message arrivals is considered where each message obsoletes all previous messages. The objective is to assess the freshness of the latest message/information that has been successfully transmitted, i.e., "age of information" (AoI). We study a variation of traditional AoI, the "Relative AoI", here defined so as to account for the presence of newly arrived messages/information to the queue to be transmitted.