Energy and Age-Aware MAC for Low-Power Massive IoT

TL;DR

This paper introduces energy and age-aware MAC protocols for energy-harvesting IoT networks, significantly reducing information freshness metrics while respecting energy limitations, and demonstrating substantial performance improvements over existing protocols.

Contribution

It proposes novel energy-aware ALOHA-like multiple access schemes tailored for energy-harvesting IoT devices, optimizing Age of Information under energy constraints.

Findings

Achieves up to 90% reduction in average AoI compared to prior protocols.

Ensures scalability and energy efficiency in massive IoT deployments.

Improves system performance by 24% to 90% with the proposed schemes.

Abstract

Efficient multiple access remains a key challenge for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) networks comprising a large set of devices with sporadic activation, thus motivating significant research in the last few years. In this paper, we consider a network wherein IoT sensors capable of energy harvesting (EH) send updates to a central server to monitor the status of the environment or machinery in which they are located. We develop energy-aware ALOHA-like multiple access schemes for such a scenario using the Age of Information (AoI) metric to quantify the freshness of an information packet. The goal is to minimize the average AoI across the entire system while adhering to energy constraints imposed by the EH process. Simulation results show that applying the designed multiple access scheme improves performance from 24% up to 90% compared to previously proposed age-dependent protocols by ensuring low average AoI and achieving scalability while simultaneously complying with the energy constraints considered.