Towards AoI-aware Smart IoT Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Age of Information (AoI) in real-world IoT and computer networks, analyzing how different protocols and hardware choices affect information freshness in practical scenarios.

Contribution

It bridges theoretical AoI models with real-life network measurements, providing insights into optimizing AoI through protocol and hardware selection.

Findings

TCP, UDP, WebSocket impact on AoI analyzed

Hardware synchronization affects AoI performance

Wireless links show different AoI behavior than wired

Abstract

Age of Information (AoI) has gained importance as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for characterizing the freshness of information in information-update systems and time-critical applications. Recent theoretical research on the topic has generated significant understanding of how various algorithms perform in terms of this metric on various system models and networking scenarios. In this paper, by the help of the theoretical results, we analyzed the AoI behavior on real-life networks, using our two test-beds, addressing IoT networks and regular computers. Excessive number of AoI measurements are provided for variations of transport protocols such as TCP, UDP and web-socket, on wired and wireless links. Practical issues such as synchronization and selection of hardware along with transport protocol, and their effects on AoI are discussed. The results provide insight toward application and transport layer mechanisms for optimizing AoI in real-life networks.