Age-of-Information Dependent Random Access for Periodic Updating

TL;DR

This paper proposes an age-dependent random access protocol for IoT systems with periodic traffic, aiming to minimize the network-wide age of information through a Markov model analysis and simulation validation.

Contribution

It introduces an age-dependent access scheme for periodic IoT traffic and provides a comprehensive Markov model analysis to evaluate its effectiveness.

Findings

The proposed scheme reduces average AoI compared to age-independent methods.

The Markov model accurately predicts AoI performance.

Simulation results confirm the AoI improvement of the age-dependent protocol.

Abstract

This paper considers an uplink Internet of Things system with synchronous periodic traffic, where multiple devices generate their status updates at the beginning of each global frame and attempt to send them to a common access point. To achieve a low network-wide age of information (AoI) in an easily implementable manner, we require each device to adopt an age-dependent random access protocol, i.e., to transmit with a certain probability only when its corresponding AoI reaches a certain threshold. We analyze the time-average expected AoI by a multi-layer Markov model where an external infinite-horizon Markov chain manages the jumps between the beginnings of frames, while two internal finite-horizon Markov chains manage the evolution during an arbitrary frame for different cases. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the modeling and the AoI advantage over age-independent schemes.