USAM: A Unified Safety-Age metric for Timeliness in Heterogeneous IoT Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes USAM, a new safety-aware timeliness metric for IoT systems that combines information freshness, deadline reliability, and response-time constraints to ensure safety standards.

Contribution

It introduces USAM, a unified metric that explicitly accounts for safety-critical timing requirements in heterogeneous IoT traffic, addressing limitations of classical freshness metrics.

Findings

Classical metrics do not capture safety timing constraints.

USAM effectively models safety-critical timing in IoT systems.

Feasibility is mainly influenced by receiver duty cycle in sparse regimes.

Abstract

Massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) deployments must simultaneously support monitoring, control, and safety-critical communication over shared wireless infrastructure. Classical timeliness metrics, such as Age of Information and its variants, quantify the freshness of received updates but do not account for deterministic safety timing requirements that arise in cyber-physical systems. Consequently, freshness-oriented metrics may indicate satisfactory performance even when worst-case timing guarantees required by functional safety standards are violated. This paper introduces the Unified Safety--Age Metric (USAM), a safety-aware timeliness metric that integrates information freshness, deadline reliability, and deterministic response-time feasibility into a single architecture-aware performance measure. We consider heterogeneous IoT traffic served by a gateway with intermittent receiver readiness and analyze system behavior in the ultra-sparse regime typical of massive machine-type communications. The analysis shows that, as device activity decreases, queueing delays become negligible and system timeliness becomes dominated by infrastructure readiness and deterministic response-time constraints. In this regime, feasibility is determined primarily by the receiver duty cycle rather than by average traffic load. Numerical results illustrate the safety-blindness of classical freshness metrics and demonstrate that USAM explicitly captures the feasibility boundary imposed by heterogeneous traffic requirements. The proposed framework provides a foundation for analyzing safety-aware communication architectures in large-scale IoT systems.