Age of Information in Uncoordinated Unslotted Updating

Sensor sources submit updates to a monitor through an unslotted, uncoordinated, unreliable multiple access collision channel. The channel is unreliable; a collision-free transmission is received successfully at the monitor with some transmission success probability. For an infinite-user model in which the sensors collectively generate updates as a Poisson process and each update has an independent exponential transmission time, a stochastic hybrid system (SHS) approach is used to derive the average age of information (AoI) as a function of the offered load and the transmission success probability. The analysis is then extended to evaluate the individual age of a selected source. When the number of sources and update transmission rate grow large in fixed proportion, the limiting asymptotic individual age is shown to provide an accurate individual age approximation, even for a small number of sources.