Relationship between Age and Value of Information for a Noisy Ornstein–Uhlenbeck Process

The age of information (AoI) has been widely used to quantify the information freshness in real-time status update systems. As the AoI is independent of the inherent property of the source data and the context, we introduce a mutual information-based value of information (VoI) framework for hidden Markov models. In this paper, we investigate the VoI and its relationship to the AoI for a noisy Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) process. We explore the effects of correlation and noise on their relationship, and find logarithmic, exponential and linear dependencies between the two in three different regimes. This gives the formal justification for the selection of non-linear AoI functions previously reported in other works. Moreover, we study the statistical properties of the VoI in the example of a queue model, deriving its distribution functions and moments. The lower and upper bounds of the average VoI are also analysed, which can be used for the design and optimisation of freshness-aware networks. Numerical results are presented and further show that, compared with the traditional linear age and some basic non-linear age functions, the proposed VoI framework is more general and suitable for various contexts.     

Channel Quality-Based Optimal Status Update for Information Freshness in Internet of Things

This paper investigates the status updating policy for information freshness in Internet of things (IoT) systems, where the channel quality is fed back to the sensor at the beginning of each time slot. Based on the channel quality, we aim to strike a balance between the information freshness and the update cost by minimizing the weighted sum of the age of information (AoI) and the energy consumption. The optimal status updating problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), and the structure of the optimal updating policy is investigated. We prove that, given the channel quality, the optimal policy is of a threshold type with respect to the AoI. In particular, the sensor remains idle when the AoI is smaller than the threshold, while the sensor transmits the update packet when the AoI is greater than the threshold. Moreover, the threshold is proven to be a non-increasing function of channel state. A numerical-based algorithm for efficiently computing the optimal thresholds is proposed for a special case where the channel is quantized into two states. Simulation results show that our proposed policy performs better than two baseline policies.     

On the Age of Information in a Two-User Multiple Access Setup

This work considers a two-user multiple access channel in which both users have Age of Information (AoI)-oriented traffic with different characteristics. More specifically, the first user has external traffic and cannot control the generation of status updates, and the second user monitors a sensor and transmits status updates to the receiver according to a generate-at-will policy. The receiver is equipped with multiple antennas and the transmitters have single antennas; the channels are subject to Rayleigh fading and path loss. We analyze the average AoI of the first user for a discrete-time first-come-first-served (FCFS) queue, last-come-first-served (LCFS) queue, and queue with packet replacement. We derive the AoI distribution and the average AoI of the second user for a threshold policy. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the average AoI of the first user for the FCFS and LCFS with preemption queue discipline to maintain the average AoI of the second user below a given level. The constraints of the optimization problem are shown to be convex. It is also shown that the objective function of the problem for the first-come-first-served queue policy is non-convex, and a suboptimal technique is introduced to effectively solve the problem using the algorithms developed for solving a convex optimization problem. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the considered optimization algorithm versus the different parameters of the system. Finally, we discuss how the analytical results of this work can be extended to capture larger setups with more than two users.     

Optimal Information Update for Energy Harvesting Sensor with Reliable Backup Energy

The timely delivery of status information collected from sensors is critical in many real-time applications, e.g., monitoring and control. In this paper, we consider a scenario where a wireless sensor sends updates to the destination over an erasure channel with the supply of harvested energy and reliable backup energy. We adopt the metric age of information (AoI) to measure the timeliness of the received updates at the destination. We aim to find the optimal information updating policy that minimizes the time-average weighted sum of the AoI and the reliable backup energy cost. First, when all the environmental statistics are assumed to be known, the optimal information updating policy exists and is proved to have a threshold structure. Based on this special structure, an algorithm for efficiently computing the optimal policy is proposed. Then, for the unknown environment, a learning-based algorithm is employed to find a near-optimal policy. The simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical derivation and the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Age-Aware Utility Maximization in Relay-Assisted Wireless Powered Communication Networks

This article investigates a relay-assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where the access point (AP) inspires the auxiliary nodes to participate together in charging the sensor, and then the sensor uses its harvested energy to send status update packets to the AP. An incentive mechanism is designed to overcome the selfishness of the auxiliary node. In order to further improve the system performance, we establish a Stackelberg game to model the efficient cooperation between the AP–sensor pair and auxiliary node. Specifically, we formulate two utility functions for the AP–sensor pair and the auxiliary node, and then formulate two maximization problems respectively. As the former problem is non-convex, we transform it into a convex problem by introducing an extra slack variable, and then by using the Lagrangian method, we obtain the optimal solution with closed-form expressions. Numerical experiments show that the larger the transmit power of the AP, the smaller the age of information (AoI) of the AP–sensor pair and the less the influence of the location of the auxiliary node on AoI. In addition, when the distance between the AP and the sensor node exceeds a certain threshold, employing the relay can achieve better AoI performance than non-relaying systems.     

Age Analysis of Status Updating System with Probabilistic Packet Preemption

The age of information (AoI) metric was proposed to measure the freshness of messages obtained at the terminal node of a status updating system. In this paper, the AoI of a discrete time status updating system with probabilistic packet preemption is investigated by analyzing the steady state of a three-dimensional discrete stochastic process. We assume that the queue used in the system is Ber/Geo/1/2*/η, which represents that the system size is 2 and the packet in the buffer can be preempted by a fresher packet with probability η. Instead of considering the system’s AoI separately, we use a three-dimensional state vector (n,m,l) to simultaneously track the real-time changes of the AoI, the age of a packet in the server, and the age of a packet waiting in the buffer. We give the explicit expression of the system’s average AoI and show that the average AoI of the system without packet preemption is obtained by letting η=0. When η is set to 1, the mean of the AoI of the system with a Ber/Geo/1/2* queue is obtained as well. Combining the results we have obtained and comparing them with corresponding average continuous AoIs, we propose a possible relationship between the average discrete AoI with the Ber/Geo/1/c queue and the average continuous AoI with the M/M/1/c queue. For each of two extreme cases where η=0 and η=1, we also determine the stationary distribution of AoI using the probability generation function (PGF) method. The relations between the average AoI and the packet preemption probability η, as well as the AoI’s distribution curves in two extreme cases, are illustrated by numerical simulations. Notice that the probabilistic packet preemption may occur, for example, in an energy harvest (EH) node of a wireless sensor network, where the packet in the buffer can be replaced only when the node collects enough energy. In particular, to exhibit the usefulness of our idea and methods and highlight the merits of considering discrete time systems, in this paper, we provide detailed discussions showing how the results about continuous AoI are derived by analyzing the corresponding discrete time system and how the discrete age analysis is generalized to the system with multiple sources. In terms of packet service process, we also propose an idea to analyze the AoI of a system when the service time distribution is arbitrary.     

Age of Information Minimization for Radio Frequency Energy-Harvesting Cognitive Radio Networks

The Age of Information (AoI) measures the freshness of information and is a critic performance metric for time-sensitive applications. In this paper, we consider a radio frequency energy-harvesting cognitive radio network, where the secondary user harvests energy from the primary users’ transmissions and opportunistically accesses the primary users’ licensed spectrum to deliver the status-update data pack. We aim to minimize the AoI subject to the energy causality and spectrum constraints by optimizing the sensing and update decisions. We formulate the AoI minimization problem as a partially observable Markov decision process and solve it via dynamic programming. Simulation results verify that our proposed policy is significantly superior to the myopic policy under different parameter settings.     

Optimizing Urgency of Information through Resource Constrained Joint Sensing and Transmission

Applications requiring services from modern wireless networks, such as those involving remote control and supervision, call for maintaining the timeliness of information flows. Current research and development efforts for 5G, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence technologies will benefit from new notions of timeliness in designing novel sensing, computing, and transmission strategies. The age of information (AoI) metric and a recent related urgency of information (UoI) metric enable promising frameworks in this direction. In this paper, we consider UoI optimization in an interactive point-to-point system when the updating terminal is resource constrained to send updates and receive/sense the feedback of the status information at the receiver. We first propose a new system model that involves Gaussian distributed time increments at the receiving end to design interactive transmission and feedback sensing functions and develop a new notion of UoI suitable for this system. We then formulate the UoI optimization with a new objective function involving a weighted combination of urgency levels at the transmitting and receiving ends. By using a Lyapunov optimization framework, we obtain a decision strategy under energy resource constraints at both transmission and receiving/sensing and show that it can get arbitrarily close to the optimal solution. We numerically study performance comparisons and observe significant improvements with respect to benchmarks.     

Implementation and Evaluation of Age-Aware Downlink Scheduling Policies in Push-Based and Pull-Based Communication

As communication systems evolve to better cater to the needs of machine-type applications such as remote monitoring and networked control, advanced perspectives are required for the design of link layer protocols. The age of information (AoI) metric has firmly taken its place in the literature as a metric and tool to measure and control the data freshness demands of various applications. AoI measures the timeliness of transferred information from the point of view of the destination. In this study, we experimentally investigate AoI of multiple packet flows on a wireless multi-user link consisting of a transmitter (base station) and several receivers, implemented using software-defined radios (SDRs). We examine the performance of various scheduling policies under push-based and pull-based communication scenarios. For the push-based communication scenario, we implement age-aware scheduling policies from the literature and compare their performance with those of conventional scheduling methods. Then, we investigate the query age of information (QAoI) metric, an adaptation of the AoI concept for pull-based scenarios. We modify the former age-aware policies to propose variants that have a QAoI minimization objective. We share experimental results obtained in a simulation environment as well as on the SDR testbed.     

Joint Optimization of Data Freshness and Fidelity for Selection Combining-Based Transmissions

Motivated by big data applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), abundant information arrives at the fusion center (FC) waiting to be processed. It is of great significance to ensure data freshness and fidelity simultaneously. We consider a wireless sensor network (WSN) where several sensor nodes observe one metric and then transmit the observations to the FC using a selection combining (SC) scheme. We adopt the age of information (AoI) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) metrics to measure the data freshness and fidelity, respectively. Explicit expressions of average AoI and MMSE are derived. After that, we jointly optimize the two metrics by adjusting the number of sensor nodes. A closed-form sub-optimal number of sensor nodes is proposed to achieve the best freshness and fidelity tradeoff with negligible errors. Numerical results show that using the proposed node number designs can effectively improve the freshness and fidelity of the transmitted data.     

Optimizing Age Penalty in Time-Varying Networks with Markovian and Error-Prone Channel State

In this paper, we consider a scenario where the base station (BS) collects time-sensitive data from multiple sensors through time-varying and error-prone channels. We characterize the data freshness at the terminal end through a class of monotone increasing functions related to Age of information (AoI). Our goal is to design an optimal policy to minimize the average age penalty of all sensors in infinite horizon under bandwidth and power constraint. By formulating the scheduling problem into a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), we reveal the threshold structure for the optimal policy and approximate the optimal decision by solving a truncated linear programming (LP). Finally, a bandwidth-truncated policy is proposed to satisfy both power and bandwidth constraint. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we prove the proposed policy is asymptotic optimal in the large sensor regime.     

On coding for reliable communication over packet networks

We consider the use of random linear network coding in lossy packet networks. In particular, we consider the following simple strategy: nodes store the packets that they receive and, whenever they have a transmission opportunity, they send out coded packets formed from random linear combinations of stored packets. In such a strategy, intermediate nodes perform additional coding yet do not decode nor wait for a block of packets before sending out coded packets. Moreover, all coding and decoding operations have polynomial complexity.We show that, provided packet headers can be used to carry an amount of side-information that grows arbitrarily large (but independently of payload size), random linear network coding achieves packet-level capacity for both single unicast and single multicast connections and for both wireline and wireless networks. This result holds as long as packets received on links arrive according to processes that have average rates. Thus packet losses on links may exhibit correlations in time or with losses on other links. In the special case of Poisson traffic with i.i.d. losses, we give error exponents that quantify the rate of decay of the probability of error with coding delay. Our analysis of random linear network coding shows not only that it achieves packet-level capacity, but also that the propagation of packets carrying “innovative” information follows the propagation of jobs through a queueing network, thus implying that fluid flow models yield good approximations.     

Integrating network structure and dynamic information for better routing strategy on scale-free networks

We study information packet routing processes on scale-free networks by mimicking the Internet traffic delivery strategies. We incorporate both the global network structure information and local queuing information in the dynamic processes. We propose several new routing strategies to guide the packet routing. The performance of the routing strategies is measured by the average transit time of the packets as well as their dependence on the traffic amount. We find that the routing strategies which integrate both global network structure information and local dynamic information perform much better than the traditional shortest-path routing protocol which takes into account only the global topological information. Moreover, from comparative studies of these routing strategies, we observe that some of our proposed methods can decrease the average transit time of packets but the performance is closely dependent on the total amount of traffic while some other proposed methods can have good performance independent of the total amount of traffic with hyper-excellent average transit time of packets. Also, numerical results show that our proposed methods integrating network structure information and local dynamic information can work much better than the methods recently proposed in [S. Sreenivasan, R. Cohen, E. López, Z. Toroczkai, H.E. Stanley, Phys. Rev. E 75 (2007) 036105, Zhi-Xi Wu, Gang Peng, Eric W.M. Wong, Kai-Hau Yeung, J. Stat. Mech. (2008) P11002.], which only considered network structure information.     

联合空时编码的水声多用户节点协同并行传输多址接人协议设计

针对水声信道长传播时延特点导致水声通信网吞吐量低的问题,提出了一种多节点协同并行传输的多址接入协议。该协议由接收端发起预约,在距离认知的基础上对预约节点划分协同传输小区,从而构建多用户节点的多输入多输出集中式网络架构;采用空时码对数据包编码,并合理规划数据包的发送时刻,使同一小区的多个用户节点发送的数据包在设定时间偏差范围内同时到达接收端,而不同小区的数据包以包链形式到达,实现多用户节点的无干扰、高效并行传输。仿真实验结果表明,与已有的其它两种协议相比,设计的协议通过空时复用的方法大幅缩短了平均端到端时延,显著提升了归一化网络吞吐量。     

Tracking an Auto-Regressive Process with Limited Communication per Unit Time

Samples from a high-dimensional first-order auto-regressive process generated by an independently and identically distributed random innovation sequence are observed by a sender which can communicate only finitely many bits per unit time to a receiver. The receiver seeks to form an estimate of the process value at every time instant in real-time. We consider a time-slotted communication model in a slow-sampling regime where multiple communication slots occur between two sampling instants. We propose a successive update scheme which uses communication between sampling instants to refine estimates of the latest sample and study the following question: Is it better to collect communication of multiple slots to send better refined estimates, making the receiver wait more for every refinement, or to be fast but loose and send new information in every communication opportunity? We show that the fast but loose successive update scheme with ideal spherical codes is universally optimal asymptotically for a large dimension. However, most practical quantization codes for fixed dimensions do not meet the ideal performance required for this optimality, and they typically will have a bias in the form of a fixed additive error. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the fast but loose scheme is not an optimal choice in the presence of such errors, and a judiciously chosen frequency of updates outperforms it.     

Age of Information of Parallel Server Systems with Energy Harvesting

Motivated by current communication networks in which users can choose different transmission channels to operate and also by the recent growth of renewable energy sources, we study the average Age of Information of a status update system that is formed by two parallel homogeneous servers and such that there is an energy source that feeds the system following a random process. An update, after getting service, is delivered to the monitor if there is energy in a battery. However, if the battery is empty, the status update is lost. We allow preemption of updates in service and we assume Poisson generation times of status updates and exponential service times. We show that the average Age of Information can be characterized by solving a system with eight linear equations. Then, we show that, when the arrival rate to both servers is large, the average Age of Information is one divided by the sum of the service rates of the servers. We also perform a numerical analysis to compare the performance of our model with that of a single server with energy harvesting and to study in detail the aforementioned convergence result.     

Traffic of packets with non-homogeneously selected destinations in scale-free network

In this paper, we study the information traffic flow in communication networks with scale-free topology. We consider the situation arising when packets are delivered to non-homogeneously selected destinations. It is found that the network capacity R_c increases with the increase of 〈k〉 (average degree of destination nodes) under local routing strategy. In contrast, R_c is essentially independent of 〈k〉 under shortest path strategy. Based on this finding, an integrated routing strategy that can enhance network capacity is proposed by combining the two strategies.     

一种基于分层的量子分组传输方案及性能分析

大规模量子通信网络中,采用量子分组传输技术能有效提升发送节点的吞吐量,提高网络中链路的利用率,增强通信的抗干扰性能.然而量子分组的快速传输与路由器性能息息相关.路由器性能瓶颈将严重影响网络的可扩展性和链路的传输效率.本文提出一种量子通信网络分层结构,并根据量子密集编码和量子隐形传态理论,给出一种基于分层的量子分组信息传输方案,实现端到端的量子信息传输.该方案先将量子分组按照目的地址进行聚类,再按聚类后的地址进行传输.仿真结果表明,基于分层的量子分组信息传输方案能够有效减少量子分组信息在量子通信网络中的传输时间,并且所减少的时间与量子路由器性能与发送的量子分组数量有关.因此,本文提出的量子分组信息传输方案适用于大规模量子通信网络的构建.     

The effect of TTL on the information traffic

In real communication protocols, the information packets have a finite Time-to-Live (TTL) to avoid the waste of network resources, such as infinite loop induced by routing error or too long transferring time. In this paper, we introduce TTL into the information traffic model on Barabási-Albert scale-free networks under local routing strategy and focus on its effect on the network capacity measured by the critical point (R_c) of phase transition from free flow to congestion. Simulations show that the network capacity and the communication velocity are improved. However, some packets are dropped before they arrived at destinations. It is found that the share of successfully arrived packets monotonously increases with the increment of TTL and it is considerably acceptable if TTL is not very small. We also examine the effect of TTL on the positive-feedback preference (PFP) internet model and the results are alike. Our work may be helpful in quantifying the effect of packet lifetime in real communication networks and in routing strategy designing.     

Internet of Things: The Optimal Generation Rates under Preemption Strategy in a Multi-Source Queuing System

With the rapid development and wide application of the Internet of Things (IoT), how to provide timely and fresh information for strategic analysis and decision-making has become a key issue. Recent studies have shown that preemption strategies are of great importance to the improvement of information freshness. In view of this, we focus on the multi-source preemptive queuing model and investigate how to control the generation rate of each source to achieve the optimal overall information freshness. Specifically, we consider two typical preemption strategies: self-preemption strategy and global-preemption strategy. Noting that the urgency requirements of the systems on the data of each source are different, we propose the weighted average age of information (AoI) to characterize the overall information freshness of the system. For the self-preemption strategy, we prove that the optimal generation rate allocation is a convex problem and present an efficient algorithm to find the optimal solution. Additionally, we also derive a closed-form approximate optimal solution under light load cases to meet the demands for rapid deployment. For the global-preemption strategy, we directly derive the closed-form optimal solution of the corresponding problem. By comparing the optimized weighted average AoIs, the performance achieved by the global-preemption system was better than that achieved by the self-preemption system in terms of the overall timeliness. The numerical analysis verified the correctness of the theoretical analysis and that the proposed approximate solution had high accuracy not only under light load cases but also under other cases.