2020/07/20 by Andrea Munari, Munari, Andrea · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Age of Information Optimization #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Computer and information sciences #IoT Networks and Protocols #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.10030
openalex publication_date 2020/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Age of information (AoI) is gaining attention as a valuable performance\nmetric for many IoT systems, in which a large number of devices report\ntime-stamped updates to a central gateway. This is the case, for instance, of\nremote sensing, monitoring, or tracking, with broad applications in the\nindustrial, vehicular, and environmental domain. In these settings, AoI\nprovides insights that are complementary to those offered by throughput or\nlatency, capturing the ability of the system to maintain an up-to-date view of\nthe status of each transmitting device. From this standpoint, while a good\nunderstanding of the metric has been reached for point-to-point links,\nrelatively little attention has been devoted to the impact that link layer\nsolutions employed in IoT systems may have on AoI. In particular, no result is\navailable for modern random access protocols, which have recently emerged as\npromising solutions to support massive machine-type communications. To start\naddressing this gap we provide in this paper the first study of the AoI of a\nscheme in this family, namely irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA). By\nmeans of a Markovian analysis, we track the AoI evolution at the gateway, prove\nthat the process is ergodic, and derive a compact closed form expression for\nits stationary distribution. Leaning on this, we compute exact formulations for\nthe average AoI and the age violation probability. The study reveals\nnon-trivial design trade-offs for IRSA and highlights the key role played by\nthe protocol operating frame size. Moreover, a comparison with the performance\nof a simpler slotted ALOHA strategy highlights a remarkable potential for\nmodern random access schemes in terms of information freshness.\n