Average Age of Information Penalty of Short-Packet Communications with Packet Management

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the age of information penalty in short-packet communication systems using different packet management strategies, deriving formulas and analyzing how system parameters affect data freshness and reliability.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized AoI penalty function and provides closed-form expressions for average AoI penalty under three packet management strategies.

Findings

Preemption strategy reduces AoI penalty more effectively.

System parameters like coding rate significantly impact AoI performance.

The mbda parameter reflects transmission reliability.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the non-linear age of information (AoI) performance in a point-to-point short packet communication system, where a transmitter generates packets based on status updates and transmits the packets to a receiver. Specifically, we investigate three packet management strategies, namely, the non-preemption with no buffer strategy, the non-preemption with one buffer strategy, and the preemption strategy. To characterize the level of the receiver's dissatisfaction on outdated data, we adopt a generalized \alpha-\beta AoI penalty function into the analysis and derive closed-form expressions for the average AoI penalty achieved by the three packet management strategies. Simulation results are used to corroborate our analysis and explicitly evaluate the impact of various system parameters, such as the coding rate and status update generation rate, on the AoI performance. Additionally, we find that the value of \alpha reflects the system transmission reliability.