Age of information in wireless networks
Igor Kadota, Muhammad Shahir Rahman, Eytan Modiano · 2020
Emerging applications, such as smart factories and fleets of drones, increasingly rely on sharing time-sensitive information for monitoring and control. In such application domains, it is essential to keep information fresh, as outdated information loses its value and can lead to system failures and safety risks. The Age of Information (AoI) is a performance metric that captures how fresh the information is from the perspective of the destination. In this paper, we show that as the congestion in the wireless network increases, the AoI degrades sharply, leading to outdated information at the destination. Leveraging years of theoretical research, we propose and implement WiFresh: an unconventional architecture that achieves near optimal information freshness in wireless networks, regardless of the level of congestion. Our experimental results show that WiFresh can improve information freshness by two orders of magnitude when compared to an equivalent standard WiFi network.