13 research outputs found
Status Updates Over Unreliable Multiaccess Channels
Applications like environmental sensing, and health and activity sensing, are
supported by networks of devices (nodes) that send periodic packet
transmissions over the wireless channel to a sink node. We look at simple
abstractions that capture the following commonalities of such networks (a) the
nodes send periodically sensed information that is temporal and must be
delivered in a timely manner, (b) they share a multiple access channel and (c)
channels between the nodes and the sink are unreliable (packets may be received
in error) and differ in quality.
We consider scheduled access and slotted ALOHA-like random access. Under
scheduled access, nodes take turns and get feedback on whether a transmitted
packet was received successfully by the sink. During its turn, a node may
transmit more than once to counter channel uncertainty. For slotted ALOHA-like
access, each node attempts transmission in every slot with a certain
probability. For these access mechanisms we derive the age of information
(AoI), which is a timeliness metric, and arrive at conditions that optimize AoI
at the sink. We also analyze the case of symmetric updating, in which updates
from different nodes must have the same AoI. We show that ALOHA-like access,
while simple, leads to AoI that is worse by a factor of about 2e, in comparison
to scheduled access
On the Minimum Achievable Age of Information for General Service-Time Distributions
There is a growing interest in analysing the freshness of data in networked
systems. Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a popular metric to quantify
this freshness at a given destination. There has been a significant research
effort in optimizing this metric in communication and networking systems under
different settings. In contrast to previous works, we are interested in a
fundamental question, what is the minimum achievable AoI in any
single-server-single-source queuing system for a given service-time
distribution? To address this question, we study a problem of optimizing AoI
under service preemptions. Our main result is on the characterization of the
minimum achievable average peak AoI (PAoI). We obtain this result by showing
that a fixed-threshold policy is optimal in the set of all randomized-threshold
causal policies. We use the characterization to provide necessary and
sufficient conditions for the service-time distributions under which
preemptions are beneficial
Minimizing the Age of Information in Wireless Networks with Stochastic Arrivals
We consider a wireless network with a base station serving multiple traffic
streams to different destinations. Packets from each stream arrive to the base
station according to a stochastic process and are enqueued in a separate (per
stream) queue. The queueing discipline controls which packet within each queue
is available for transmission. The base station decides, at every time t, which
stream to serve to the corresponding destination. The goal of scheduling
decisions is to keep the information at the destinations fresh. Information
freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric.
In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the AoI performance achievable by
any given network operating under any queueing discipline. Then, we consider
three common queueing disciplines and develop both an Optimal Stationary
Randomized policy and a Max-Weight policy under each discipline. Our approach
allows us to evaluate the combined impact of the stochastic arrivals, queueing
discipline and scheduling policy on AoI. We evaluate the AoI performance both
analytically and using simulations. Numerical results show that the performance
of the Max-Weight policy is close to the analytical lower bound