Age of Information and Energy Consumption in IoT: an Experimental Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates the relationship between Age of Information (AoI) and energy consumption in battery-powered IoT devices over cellular networks using MQTT, providing insights into optimizing energy efficiency and information freshness.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive experimental analysis of how AoI correlates with energy use in IoT devices, considering various operational parameters.

Findings

Identifies optimal configurations for energy-efficient IoT communication.

Demonstrates trade-offs between AoI and energy consumption.

Provides practical guidelines for IoT device operation over cellular networks.

Abstract

The Age of Information (AoI) is an end-to-end metric frequently used to understand how "fresh" the information about a remote system is. In this paper, we present an experimental study of the relationship between AoI and the energy spent by the device that produces information, e.g. an IoT device or a monitoring sensor. Such a relationship has been almost neglected so far, but it is particularly important whenever the sensing side is battery-operated. The study is carried out in a scenario where access is achieved via the cellular network and information is transferred using MQTT, a popular messaging protocol in the IoT domain. Numerous parameters of operation are considered, and the most efficient solutions in all configurations are provided.