No Arabic abstract
The notion of age-of-information (AoI) is investigated in the context of large-scale wireless networks, in which transmitters need to send a sequence of information packets, which are generated as independent Bernoulli processes, to their intended receivers over a shared spectrum. Due to interference, the rate of packet depletion at any given node is entangled with both the spatial configurations, which determine the path loss, and temporal dynamics, which influence the active states, of the other transmitters, resulting in the queues to interact with each other in both space and time over the entire network. To that end, variants in the packet update frequency affect not just the inter-arrival time but also the departure process, and the impact of such phenomena on the AoI is not well understood. In this paper, we establish a theoretical framework to characterize the AoI performance in the aforementioned setting. Particularly, tractable expressions are derived for both the peak and average AoI under two different transmission protocols, namely the FCFS and the LCFS-PR. Based on the theoretical outcomes, we find that: i) networks operating under LCFS-PR are able to attain smaller values of peak and average AoI than that under FCFS, whereas the gain is more pronounced when the infrastructure is densely deployed, ii) in sparsely deployed networks, ALOHA with a universally designed channel access probability is not instrumental in reducing the AoI, thus calling for more advanced channel access approaches, and iii) when the infrastructure is densely rolled out, there exists a non-trivial ALOHA channel access probability that minimizes the peak and average AoI under both FCFS and LCFS-PR.
Given $n$ randomly located source-destination (S-D) pairs on a fixed area network that want to communicate with each other, we study the age of information with a particular focus on its scaling as the network size $n$ grows. We propose a three-phase transmission scheme that utilizes textit{hierarchical cooperation} between users along with textit{mega update packets} and show that an average age scaling of $O(n^{alpha(h)}log n)$ per-user is achievable where $h$ denotes the number of hierarchy levels and $alpha(h) = frac{1}{3cdot2^h+1}$ which tends to $0$ as $h$ increases such that asymptotically average age scaling of the proposed scheme is $O(log n)$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best average age scaling result in a status update system with multiple S-D pairs.
While age of Information (AoI) has gained importance as a metric characterizing the fresh-ness of information in information-update systems and time-critical applications, most previous studies on AoI have been theoretical. In this chapter, we compile a set of recent works reporting API measurements in real-life networks and experimental testbeds, and investigating practical issues such as synchronization, the role of various transport layer protocols, congestion control mechanisms, application of machine learning for adaptation to network conditions, and device related bottlenecks such as limited processing power.
We consider the age of information in a multihop multicast network where there is a single source node sending time-sensitive updates to $n^L$ end nodes, and $L$ denotes the number of hops. In the first hop, the source node sends updates to $n$ first-hop receiver nodes, and in the second hop each first-hop receiver node relays the update packets that it has received to $n$ further users that are connected to it. This network architecture continues in further hops such that each receiver node in hop $ell$ is connected to $n$ further receiver nodes in hop $ell+1$. We study the age of information experienced by the end nodes, and in particular, its scaling as a function of $n$. We show that, using an earliest $k$ transmission scheme in each hop, the age of information at the end nodes can be made a constant independent of $n$. In particular, the source node transmits each update packet to the earliest $k_1$ of the $n$ first-hop nodes, and each first-hop node that receives the update relays it to the earliest $k_2$ out of $n$ second-hop nodes that are connected to it and so on. We determine the optimum $k_ell$ stopping value for each hop $ell$ for arbitrary shifted exponential link delays.
This paper summarizes recent contributions of the authors and their co-workers in the area of information-theoretic security.
Timeliness is an emerging requirement for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In IoT networks, where a large-number of nodes are distributed, severe interference may incur during the transmission phase which causes age of information (AoI) degradation. It is therefore important to study the performance limit of AoI as well as how to achieve such limit. In this paper, we aim to optimize the AoI in random access Poisson networks. By taking into account the spatio-temporal interactions amongst the transmitters, an expression of the peak AoI is derived, based on explicit expressions of the optimal peak AoI and the corresponding optimal system parameters including the packet arrival rate and the channel access probability are further derived. It is shown that with a given packet arrival rate (resp. a given channel access probability), the optimal channel access probability (resp. the optimal packet arrival rate), is equal to one under a small node deployment density, and decrease monotonically as the spatial deployment density increases due to the severe interference caused by spatio-temproal coupling between transmitters. When joint tuning of the packet arrival rate and channel access probability is performed, the optimal channel access probability is always set to be one. Moreover, with the sole tuning of the channel access probability, it is found that the optimal peak AoI performance can be improved with a smaller packet arrival rate only when the node deployment density is high, which is contrast to the case of the sole tuning of the packet arrival rate, where a higher channel access probability always leads to better optimal peak AoI regardless of the node deployment density. In all the cases of optimal tuning of system parameters, the optimal peak AoI linearly grows with the node deployment density as opposed to an exponential growth with fixed system parameters.