Is Multichannel Access Useful in Timely Information Update?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how multichannel access impacts the freshness of information, measured by Age of Information (AoI), in wireless systems, showing that multichannel strategies can improve both average and bounded AoI performance.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of AoI in multichannel access systems, deriving average AoI considering packet error rates and evaluating bounded AoI performance.

Findings

Multichannel access can reduce average AoI.

Multichannel access achieves uniform bounded AoI across different received powers.

Dividing the channel into multiple subchannels improves information freshness.

Abstract

This paper investigates information freshness of multichannel access in information update systems. Age of information (AoI) is a fundamentally important metric to characterize information freshness, defined as the time elapsed since the generation of the last successfully received update. When multiple devices share the same wireless channel to send updates to a common receiver, an interesting question is whether dividing the whole channel into several subchannels will lead to better AoI performance. Given the same frequency band, dividing it into different numbers of subchannels lead to different transmission times and packet error rates (PER) of short update packets, thus affecting information freshness. We focus on a multichannel access system where different devices take turns to transmit with a cyclic schedule repeated over time. We first derive the average AoI by estimating the PERs of short packets. Then we examine bounded AoI, for which the instantaneous AoI is required to be below a threshold a large percentage of the time. Simulation results indicate that multichannel access can provide low average AoI and uniform bounded AoI simultaneously across different received powers. Overall, our investigations provide insights into practical designs of multichannel access systems with AoI requirements.