2025/06/05 by Andrea Munari, Munari, Andrea, Čedomir Stefanović +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Age of Information Optimization #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #IoT Networks and Protocols #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.04793
openalex publication_date 2025/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a key metric for assessing data freshness in IoT applications, where a large number of devices report time-stamped updates to a monitor. Such systems often rely on random access protocols based on variations of ALOHA at the link layer, where collision resolution algorithms play a fundamental role to enable reliable delivery of packets. In this context, we provide the first analytical characterization of average AoI for the classical Capetanakis tree-based algorithm with gated access under exogenous traffic, capturing the protocol's dynamics, driven by sporadic packet generation and variable collision resolution times. We also explore a variant with early termination, where contention is truncated after a maximum number of slots even if not all users are resolved. The approach introduces a fundamental trade-off between reliability and timeliness, allowing stale packets to be dropped to improve freshness.