Robust Improvement of the Age of Information by Adaptive Packet Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive packet coding scheme for wireless networks that significantly improves the Age of Information (AoI), demonstrating robustness to network variations and providing explicit formulas for AoI metrics.

Contribution

It derives closed-form expressions for AoI in adaptive coded wireless networks, guiding robust system design under varying channel and topology conditions.

Findings

Adaptive coding reduces AoI compared to uncoded transmission.

Significant AoI improvements are robust to network topology and channel changes.

The scheme balances throughput, delay, and information freshness effectively.

Abstract

We consider a wireless communication network with an adaptive scheme to select the number of packets to be admitted and encoded for each transmission, and characterize the information timeliness. For a network of erasure channels and discrete time, we provide closed form expressions for the Average and Peak Age of Information (AoI) as functions of admission control and adaptive coding parameters, the feedback delay, and the maximum feasible end-to-end rate that depends on channel conditions and network topology. These new results guide the system design for robust improvements of the AoI when transmitting time sensitive information in the presence of topology and channel changes. We illustrate the benefits of using adaptive packet coding to improve information timeliness by characterizing the network performance with respect to the AoI along with its relationship to throughput (rate of successfully decoded packets at the destination) and per-packet delay. We show that significant AoI performance gains can be obtained in comparison to the uncoded case, and that these gains are robust to network variations as channel conditions and network topology change.