Age of Information in Wireless Networks: Spatiotemporal Analysis and Locally Adaptive Power Control

The boom in Internet of Things has spawned many real-time applications, which have stringent requirements for the timeliness of information delivery. As a result, age of information (AoI) has emerged as a metric to evaluate information freshness at the destination and aroused widespread attention from both academia and industry. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to evaluate the statistics of AoI, including its average and violation probability, in wireless networks under different types of sources and updating patterns. The analyses account for the randomness that arises from both the spatial deployment and temporal queueing dynamics, and its accuracy is verified through simulations. Based on the analytical results, we design a locally adaptive power control policy to optimize the sum of average AoI of all nodes, which allows each node to assign transmit power according to its local observation. The proposed scheme has low implementation complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed power control policy can significantly improve information freshness. The scheme is well adapted to variants of network environment and heterogeneous source-destination distance. Further, we evaluate the effect of the retransmission mechanism and updating patterns on the AoI performance.

Automated summary

The rise of the Internet of Things has led to the development of real-time applications with strict requirements for information delivery timeliness. The concept of age of information (AoI) has emerged as a metric to evaluate information freshness, attracting significant attention from academia and industry. This paper presents a theoretical framework to evaluate the statistics of AoI in wireless networks with different sources and updating patterns, taking into account the randomness of spatial deployment and temporal queueing dynamics. The proposed locally adaptive power control policy based on the analytical results improves information freshness significantly.