Age of Information in Locally Adaptive Frame Slotted ALOHA

TL;DR

This paper introduces a locally adaptive frame slotted ALOHA policy that dynamically adjusts frame sizes based on local conditions, significantly reducing the Age of Information in a shared network.

Contribution

It proposes a low-complexity, distributed adaptive FSA policy that improves AoI by local environment-based frame adjustments and provides analytical and simulation validation.

Findings

Achieves lower AoI compared to standard slotted ALOHA.

Effectively reduces interference and balances update intervals.

Demonstrates significant performance gains through simulations.

Abstract

We consider a random access network consisting of source-destination pairs. Each source node generates status updates and transmits this information to its intended destination over a shared spectrum. The goal is to minimize the network-wide Age of Information (AoI). We develop a frame slotted ALOHA (FSA)-based policy for generating and transmitting status updates, where the frame size of each source node is adjusted according to its local environment. The proposed policy is of low complexity and can be implemented in a distributed manner. Additionally, it significantly improves the network AoI performance by (a) equalizing the update generation intervals at each source and (b) reducing interference across the network. Furthermore, we derive an analytical expression for the average network AoI attained for that policy. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme through simulations, which demonstrate that the locally adaptive FSA policy achieves a remarkable gain in terms of AoI compared to the slotted ALOHA counterpart, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.