Age of Information under Source-Aware Truncated ARQ in Multi-Source Wireless Status Updating

TL;DR

This paper introduces a source-aware truncated ARQ scheme for multi-source IoT systems, providing analytical insights into age of information, energy efficiency, and timeliness-energy tradeoffs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel SATARQ protocol with differentiated MTTs, models the AoI process as a Markov chain, and analyzes its impact on energy and timeliness.

Findings

SATARQ improves the timeliness-energy tradeoff.

Analytical expressions for AoI and power consumption are derived.

Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis.

Abstract

This paper studies information timeliness in multi-source wireless Internet of Things (IoT) status updating systems under a truncated Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol. We propose a source-aware truncated ARQ (SATARQ) scheme that allows differentiated maximum transmission times (MTTs) tailored to different sources. This work focuses on a wireless system with preemptive update management. To study the statistical characteristics of the age of information (AoI) process for each source, a multi-dimensional age process (MDAP) is developed and modeled as a Markov chain, tracking both the AoI and the age of the concerned source's update currently in transmission. Via Markov analysis of the MDAP, we obtain analytical expressions for the distributions and averages of the AoI and peak AoI, as well as the average power consumption of IoT device. The timeliness-energy tradeoff is analyzed by examining the impact of the MTT, update generation probability (UGP), and wireless transmission power (TP). Moreover, this work explores the energy efficiency of the wireless status updating process and its relationship with the information timeliness and energy cost. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis. Finally, it is demonstrated that the proposed SATARQ, combined with the optimization of MTTs, UGPs, and TPs, significantly improves the overall timeliness-energy tradeoff and energy efficiency across all sources.