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The history of technological innovations is replete with examples of both positive and negative societal impacts. An often-cited example is that of textile workers (referred to as Luddites) who rebelled against the machines that threatened their livelihoods as their artisans’ skilled labor was being replaced with less skilled machine workers. On the other hand, a positive impact of that technology was that the machine workers could do the work with higher efficiency. It is generally the case that for successful innovations, the positives outweigh the negatives resulting in a net positive to societies. This pattern continues to repeat itself in this information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hobby of amateur radio, or “ham radio” as it is commonly known among its 3 million global practitioners, has been at the vanguard of electrical and computer engineering since a young Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, first demonstrated wireless at his summer home in Bologna in 1894. Ever since that fateful discovery, amateur radio has played vast and vital roles in capturing the imagination of inventors, spawning new technologies, fueling the global engineering work force, and fostering friendship and international goodwill. This three-part series of articles chronicles the historical evolution of amateur radio, and shows the astounding impact that the ham radio hobby has made on both the engineering profession and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In applications of remote sensing, estimation, and control, timely communication is critical but not always ensured by high-rate communication. This work proposes decentralized age-efficient transmission policies for random access channels with $M$ transmitters. We propose the notion of age-gain of a packet to quantify how much the packet will reduce the instantaneous age of information at the receiver side upon successful delivery. We then utilize this notion to propose a transmission policy in which transmitters act in a decentralized manner based on the age-gain of their available packets. In particular, each transmitter sends its latest packet only if its corresponding age-gain is beyond a certain threshold which could be computed adaptively using the collision feedback or found as a fixed value analytically in advance. Both methods improve age of information significantly compared to the state of the art. In the limit of large $M$ , we prove that when the arrival rate is small (below $\frac {1}{eM}$), slotted ALOHA-type algorithms are order optimal. As the arrival rate increases beyond $\frac {1}{eM}$ , while age increases under slotted ALOHA, it decreases significantly under the proposed age-based policies. For arrival rates $\theta $ , $\theta =\frac {1}{o(M)}$ , the proposed algorithms provide a multiplicative gain of at least two compared to the minimum age under slotted ALOHA (minimum over all arrival rates). We conclude that it is beneficial to increase the sampling rate (and hence the arrival rate) and transmit packets selectively based on their age-gain. This is surprising and contrary to common practice where the arrival rate is optimized to attain the minimum AoI. We further extend our results to other random access technologies such as Carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of Information (AoI) is an application layer performance metric that quantifies the freshness of information. This paper investigates scheduling problems at network edge when there is an AoI requirement for each source node, which we call Maximum AoI Threshold (MAT). Specifically, we want to determine whether or not a vector of MATs corresponding to the source nodes is schedulable, and if so, find a feasible scheduler for it. For a small network, we present an optimal procedure called Cyclic Scheduler Detection (CSD) that can determine the schedulability with absolute certainty. For a large network where CSD is not applicable, we present a novel low-complexity procedure, called Fictitious Polynomial Mapping (FPM), and prove that FPM can find a feasible scheduler for any MAT vector when the load is under $\ln 2$. We use extensive numerical results to validate our theoretical results and show that the performance of FPM is significantly better than a state-of-the-art scheduling algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covert device-to-device (D2D) communication is recently proposed to help D2D pairs hide the existence of transmission from being detected by a warden. However, most of the existing works only focus on guaranteeing the communication covertness, while they ignore the information freshness and energy consumption which are important for the delay-sensitive applications and energy-constrained devices. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient transmit probability-power control scheme for covert D2D communication with the information freshness requirement. Specifically, we first construct a novel status update model in covert D2D communication, and further derive the closed-form average age of information (AoI) to characterize the freshness of status information. Then, from the perspective of warden, we analyze its detection performance and derive the minimum detection error probability to measure the communication covertness. Subsequently, from the perspective of D2D pair, we propose the notion of covert energy efficiency (EE) to characterize the tradeoff between covert rate and power consumption. Guided by this, we jointly optimize the transmit probability and transmit power of status information to maximize the covert EE of the D2D pair subject to the constraints of communication covertness and information freshness. Due to its intractability, we design an iterative algorithm based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. Simulation results verify the correctness of derived expressions and show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the peak age of information (PAoI) in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), where Internet of underwater things (IoUT) nodes transmit the latest packets to the sink node, which is in charge of adjusting the sleep-scheduling to match network demands. In order to reduce PAoI, we propose active queue management (AQM) policy of the IoUT node, beneficially compresses the packets having large waiting time. Moreover, we deduce the closed-form expressions of the average PAoI as well as the energy cost relying on probability generating function and matrix-geometric solutions. Numerical results verify that the IoUT node relying on the AQM policy has a lower PAoI and energy cost in comparison to those using non-AQM policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works on age of information and erasure channels have dealt with specific models and computed the average age or average peak age for certain settings. In this paper, given a source that produces a letter every $T_{s}$ seconds and an erasure channel that can be used every $T_{c}$ seconds, we ask what is the coding strategy that minimizes the time-average “age of information” that an observer of the channel output incurs. We first analyze the case where the source alphabet and the channel-input alphabet have the same size. We show that a trivial coding strategy is optimal and a closed form expression for the age can be derived. We then analyze the case where the alphabets have different sizes. We use a random coding argument to bound the average age and show that the average age achieved using random codes converges to the optimal average age of linear block codes as the source alphabet becomes large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of Information (AoI) has become an important metric to evaluate the freshness of information, and studies of minimizing AoI in wireless networks have drawn extensive attention. In mobile edge networks, changes in critical levels for distinct information is important for users’ decision making, especially when merely partial observations are available. However, existing research has not yet addressed this issue, which is the subject of this paper. To address this issue, we first establish a system model, in which the information freshness is quantified by changes in its critical levels. We formulate Age-of-Critical-Information (AoCI) minimization as an optimization problem, with the purpose of minimizing the average relative AoCI of mobile clients to help them make timely decisions. Then, we propose an information-aware heuristic algorithm that can reach optimal performance with full obsevations in an offline manner. For online scheduling, an imitation learning-based scheduling approach is designed to choose update preferences for mobile clients under partial observations, where policies obtained by the above heuristic algorithm are utilized for expert policies. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of our designed algorithm from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studiesan unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless network, where a UAV is dispatched to gather information from ground sensor nodes (SN) and transfer the collected data to a depot. The information freshness is captured by the age of information (AoI) metric, whilst the energy consumption of the UAV is seen as another performance criterion. Most importantly, the AoI and energy efficiency are inherently competing metrics, since decreasing the AoI requires the UAV returning to the depot more frequently, leading to a higher energy consumption. To this end, we design UAV paths that optimize these two competing metrics jointly and reveal the Pareto frontier. To formulate this problem, a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is proposed with a flow-based constraint set and we apply Bender’s decomposition on the proposed formulation. Numerical results show that the proposed method allows deriving non-dominated solutions among two competing metrics when designing the UAV path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multipath communication is a critical technology to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to interactive and Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring and control applications. In this work, we model the exemplary case with two paths and consider different strategies that exploit redundancy and coding to improve the timing performance of wireless communications. We consider two disparate scenarios, in which the data blocks are generated via a Markovian and a deterministic process, respectively. We consider simple scheduling and coding schemes, considering both lossless and lossy encoding, and modeling the resulting process as a fork-join queue with different arrival processes. We analyze the full distribution of two relevant metrics for the two-path case: the packet delay and the Peak Age of Information (PAoI), which measures the freshness of the information at the receiver. The results show interesting trade-offs between the update frequency, latency, PAoI, and level of compression, with interesting implications for system designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a status updating system where updates are generated at a constant rate at $K$ sources and sent to the corresponding recipients through a noise-free broadcast channel. We assume that perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter before each transmission, and the transmitter is able to utilize the CSI to precode the updates. Our object is to design optimal precoding schemes to minimize the summed average age of information (AoI) at the recipients. Under various assumptions on the size of each update $B$ , the number of transmit antennas $M$ , and the number of receive antennas $N$ at each user, this paper identifies the corresponding age-optimal precoding and transmission scheduling strategies. Specifically, for the case when $N=1$ , a round-robin based updating scheme is shown to be optimal. For the two-user systems with $N>B$ or $M\notin [N:2N]$ , framed updating schemes are proven to be optimal. For other cases in the two-user systems, a framed alternating updating scheme is proven to be 2-optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their promising applications and intriguing characteristics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be dispatched as flying base stations to serve multiple energy-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors. Moreover, to ensure fresh data collection while providing sustainable energy support to a large set of IoT devices, a required number of UAVs should be deployed to carry out these two tasks efficiently and promptly. Indeed, the data collection requires that UAVs first make Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) to supply IoT devices with the necessary energy in the downlink. Then, IoT devices perform Wireless Information Transmission (WIT) to UAVs in the uplink based on the harvested energy. However, it turns out that when the same UAV performs WIT and WET, its energy usage and the data collection time are severely penalized. Worse yet, it is difficult to efficiently coordinate between UAVs to improve the performance in terms of WET and WIT. This work proposes to divide UAVs into two teams to behave as data collectors and energy transmitters, respectively. A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) method, called TEAM, is leveraged to jointly optimize both teams’ trajectories, minimize the expected Age of Information (AoI), maximize the throughput of IoT devices, minimize the energy utilization of UAVs, and enhance the energy transfer. Simulation results depict that TEAM can effectively synchronize UAV teams and adapt their trajectories while serving a large-scale dynamic IoT environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) with advanced communication, computing, and control capabilities will provide not only a convenient means of transportation but also an emerging platform for real-time social communications and networking. Thereby, it is crucial to enable timely exchange of information over the dynamic cyber-physical-social system enabled by the AVs. In this paper, we consider age of information (AoI)-centric real-time information dissemination over vehicular social networks (VSNs), where the AoI captures the freshness of received data packets. We first propose a mathematical framework based on the mean-field theory (MFT) to analyze the network AoI (NAoI) of VSNs, namely AoI for the AV that lastly receives the information update in the network. The proposed analytical framework considers both the social features of vehicular networks, which are characterized using the scale-free network theory, and the underlying wireless communication process to evaluate the NAoI. Then, we further consider joint optimization of the information update rate at the source node and the transmit probabilities at the AVs for minimization of the average peak NAoI (PNAoI), i.e., the time average of peak values occurred in the evolution of the NAoI, which is solved via a novel parametric optimization scheme. Both analytical and simulation results show that compared with several baseline schemes, the proposed scheme can exploit the scale-free feature of the VSNs to significantly lower the average PNAoI by up to 96 $\%$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a scheduling problem, in which several streams of status update packets with different priority levels are sent through a shared channel to their destinations. We introduce a notion of lexicographic age optimality, or simply lex-age-optimality, to evaluate the performance of multi-class status update policies. In particular, a lex-age-optimal scheduling policy first minimizes the Age of Information (AoI) metrics for high-priority streams, and then, within the set of optimal policies for high-priority streams, achieves the minimum AoI metrics for low-priority streams. We propose a new scheduling policy named Preemptive Priority, Maximum Age First, Last-Generated, First-Served (PP-MAF-LGFS), and prove that the PP-MAF-LGFS scheduling policy is lex-age-optimal. This result holds (i) for minimizing any time-dependent, symmetric, and non-decreasing age penalty function; (ii) for minimizing any non-decreasing functional of the stochastic process formed by the age penalty function; and (iii) for the cases where different priority classes have distinct arrival traffic patterns, age penalty functions, and age penalty functionals. For example, the PP-MAF-LGFS scheduling policy is lex-age-optimal for minimizing the probability of age violation of a high-priority stream and the time-average age of a low-priority stream. Numerical results are provided to illustrate our theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the proliferation of the massive machine type communication devices (MTCDs) in beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks, energy harvesting (EH) aided next generation multiple access (NGMA) systems have drawn substantial attention in the context of energy-efficient data sensing and transmission. However, without adaptive time slot (TS) and power allocation schemes, NGMA systems relying on stochastic sampling instants might lead to tardy actions associated both with high age of information (AoI) as well as high power consumption. For mitigating the energy consumption, we exploit a pair of sleep-scheduling policies, namely the multiple vacation (MV) policy and start-up threshold (ST) policy, which are characterized in the context of three typical multiple access protocols, including time-division multiple access (TDMA), frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Furthermore, we derive closed-form expressions for the MTCD system’s peak AoI, which are formulated as the optimization objective under the constraints of EH power, status update rate and stability conditions. An exact linear search based algorithm is proposed for finding the optimal solution by fixing the status update rate. As a design alternative, a low complexity concave-convex procedure (CCP) is also formulated for finding a near-optimal solution relying on the original problem’s transformation into a form represented by the difference of two convex problems. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are beneficial in terms of yielding a lower peak AoI at a low power consumption in the context of the multiple access protocols considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the content service provision of information-centric vehicular networks (ICVNs) is investigated from the aspect of mobile edge caching, considering the dynamic driving-related context information. To provide up-to-date information with low latency, two schemes are designed for cache update and content delivery at the roadside units (RSUs). The roadside unit centric (RSUC) scheme decouples cache update and content delivery through bandwidth splitting, where the cached content items are updated regularly in a round-robin manner. The request adaptive (ReA) scheme updates the cached content items upon user requests with certain probabilities. The performance of both proposed schemes are analyzed, whereby the average age of information (AoI) and service latency are derived in closed forms. Surprisingly, the AoI-latency trade-off does not always exist, and frequent cache update can degrade both performances. Thus, the RSUC and ReA schemes are further optimized to balance the AoI and latency. Extensive simulations are conducted on SUMO and OMNeT++ simulators, and the results show that the proposed schemes can reduce service latency by up to 80 percent while guaranteeing content freshness in heavily loaded ICVNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates a remote status updating system where the transmission process is modeled as a multi-stream M/G/1/1 non-preemptive system. We derive the closed-form expression of the average AoI of each stream in a heterogeneous case, where the distributions of service time are different for streams. To obtain more insights, we apply the results in a homogeneous system, where the service time distributions are identical, and find that preemption of packets would not always lead to the reduction of AoI, especially when the variance coefficient of the service time is small. We further optimize the generation rate to minimize the sum of average AoI. The results in heterogeneous cases show that given the same average service time for all streams, a higher generation rate should be allocated to the stream with a small service time variance. For the homogeneous cases with different AoI urgency weights for each stream, a higher generation rate should be reserved for the stream with more urgent AoI requirements for timeliness improvement. Besides, a lower bound on sum of average AoI is also provided, which only depends on the service rate and the number of data streams in homogeneous systems. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of Information (AoI) has become an important concept in communications, as it allows system designers to measure the freshness of the information available to remote monitoring or control processes. However, its definition tacitly assumes that new information is used at any time, which is not always the case: the instants at which information is collected and used may be dependent on a certain query process, and resource-constrained environments such as most Internet of Things (IoT) use cases require precise timing to fully exploit the limited available transmissions. In this work, we consider a pull-based communication model in which the freshness of information is only important when the receiver generates a query: if the monitoring process is not using the value, the age of the last update is irrelevant. We optimize the Age of Information at Query (QAoI), a metric that samples the AoI at relevant instants, better fitting the pull-based resource-constrained scenario, and show how this can lead to very different choices. Our results show that QAoI-aware optimization can significantly reduce the average and worst-case perceived age for both periodic and stochastic queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a crucial part of the communication-based train control (CBTC) system, the wireless communication subsystem is responsible for transmitting safety-critical information, which directly affects the safe and efficient operation of the urban rail transit. The dependability analysis method for wireless communication in CBTC is critical and necessary to ensure the stable transmission of safety-critical information. However, most of the existing researches in CBTC lack a unified evaluation index to analyze the wireless communication dependability. In this paper, the dependability of wireless communication system in CBTC is established. To be specific, timeliness, integrity, security, and safety are used to describe the dependability of CBTC wireless communication system in our definition. The age of information (AoI) is used to quantitatively analyze the dependability in the CBTC wireless communication system. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed dependability analysis method, we quantitatively introduce the dependability of wireless communication system in CBTC with different scenarios, including packet-drop, re-transmission, handoff, and cyber-attack. Simulation results show that the designed dependability analysis method with quantized AoI can efficiently describe the dependability of CBTC wireless communication system in different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of information (AoI) has been widely accepted as a measure quantifying freshness of status information in real-time status update systems. In many of such systems, multiple sources share a limited network resource and therefore the AoIs defined for the individual sources should be correlated with each other. However, there are not found any results in the literature studying the correlation of two or more AoIs in a status update system with multiple sources. In this work, we consider a multi-source system sharing a common service facility and provide a framework to investigate joint performance of the multiple AoIs. We then apply our framework to a simple pushout server with multiple sources and derive a closed-form expression for the joint Laplace transform of the AoIs in the case with independent M/G inputs. We further show some properties of the correlation coefficient of AoIs in the two-source system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a status update system where multiple sensors communicate timely information about various random processes to a sink. The sensors share orthogonal sub-channels to transmit such information in the form of status update packets. A central controller can control the sampling actions of the sensors to trade-off between the transmit power consumption and information freshness which is quantified by the Age of Information (AoI). We jointly optimize the sampling action of each sensor, the transmit power allocation, and the sub-channel assignment to minimize the average total transmit power of all sensors, subject to a maximum average AoI constraint for each sensor. To solve the problem, we develop a dynamic control algorithm using the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty method and provide optimality analysis of the algorithm. According to the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty method, to solve the main problem, we need to solve an optimization problem in each time slot which is a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem. We propose a low-complexity sub-optimal solution for this per-slot optimization problem that provides near-optimal performance and we evaluate the computational complexity of the solution. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the proposed dynamic control algorithm and the performance of the sub-optimal solution for the per-slot optimization problem versus the different parameters of the system. The results show that the proposed dynamic control algorithm achieves more than $60~\%$ saving in the average total transmit power compared to a baseline policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing demands of multimedia contents brings a great profit to the content providers, but also a challenge of how to efficiently delivery contents to make users have a good Quality of Experience (QoE). Take the advantage of owning wireless infrastructures, the telco operator is motivated to build a content platform for entering the market of content. In this paper, we consider a content platform belonging to the telco operator, which can provide periodically-updated contents with small Age of Information (AoI), namely, fresh contents. The content update consumes radio resource resulting in a trade-off between the AoI and the latency. We adopt the contract theory to monetize contents considering the above two factors in a realistic asymmetric information scenario. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the feasibility of the contract. We further propose the optimal update schemes and the corresponding fees, which maximizes the utility of the operator. Simulation reveals that the proposed contract enables the users, who attach importance to the freshness, to obtain frequently updating contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Internet of Things (IoT), the freshness of status updates is crucial for mission-critical applications. In this regard, it is suggested to quantify the freshness of updates by using Age of Information (AoI) from the receiver’s perspective. Specifically, the AoI measures the freshness over time. However, the freshness in the content is neglected. In this paper, we introduce an age-based utility, named as Age of Changed Information (AoCI), which captures both the passage of time and the change of information content. By modeling the underlying physical process as a discrete time Markov chain, we investigate the AoCI in a time-slotted status update system, where a sensor samples the physical process and transmits the update packets to the destination. With the aim of minimizing the weighted sum of the AoCI and the update cost, we formulate an infinite horizon average cost Markov Decision Process. We show that the optimal updating policy has a special structure with respect to the AoCI and identify the condition under which the special structure exists. By exploiting the special structure, we provide a low complexity relative policy iteration algorithm that finds the optimal updating policy. We further investigate the optimal policy for two special cases. In the first case where the state of the physical process transits with equiprobability, we show that optimal policy is of threshold type and derive the closed-form of the optimal threshold. We then study a more generalized periodic Markov model of the physical process in the second case. Lastly, simulation results are laid out to exhibit the performance of the optimal updating policy and its superiority over the zero-wait baseline policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the average age minimization problem where only a fraction of the network users can transmit simultaneously over unreliable channels. Finding the optimal scheduling scheme, in this case, is known to be challenging. Accordingly, the Whittle’s index policy was proposed in the literature as a low-complexity heuristic to the problem. Although simple to implement, characterizing this policy’s performance is recognized to be a notoriously tricky task. In the sequel, we provide a new mathematical approach to establish its optimality in the many-users regime for specific network settings. Contrary to previous works in the literature that use restrictive mathematical assumptions, which can be challenging to verify, our novel approach is based on intricate techniques and it is free of any strong mathematical assumptions. These findings showcase that the Whittle’s index policy has analytically provable asymptotic optimality for the AoI minimization problem. Finally, we lay out numerical results that corroborate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the policy’s notable performance in the many-users regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an information update system where an information receiver requests updates from an information provider in order to minimize its age of information. The updates are generated at the information provider (transmitter) as a result of completing a set of tasks such as collecting data and performing computations on them. We refer to this as the update generation process. We model the quality of an update as an increasing function of the processing time spent while generating the update at the transmitter. In particular, we use distortion as a proxy for quality, and model distortion as a decreasing function of processing time. Processing longer at the transmitter results in a better quality (lower distortion) update, but it causes the update to age in the process. We determine the age-optimal policies for the update request times at the receiver and the update processing times at the transmitter subject to a minimum required quality (maximum allowed distortion) constraint on the updates. For the required quality constraint, we consider the cases of constant maximum allowed distortion constraints, as well as age-dependent maximum allowed distortion constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data visualization is a powerful tool to cope with the demands of our current information age. In order to understand and be able to develop visualizations for specific use cases, data visualization activities (vis activities) have been proposed in recent years. These highly effective tools focus on practical relevance, reflection, and discussion in order to teach data visualization knowledge in a variety of contexts. However, the conscious selection of one or more vis activities for learners in comprehensive courses remains difficult. We aim to support this process by proposing a didactic vis framework. Based on Bloom's revised learning taxonomy, we decompose vis activities into distinct learning activities with their specific learning goals. By assigning the learning goals to the cognitive process and knowledge dimensions, a didactic course structure can be planned and evaluated. To demonstrate this didactic vis framework, we conducted several workshops based on an existing interface construction kit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical modeling of Age of Information (AoI) and Peak AoI (PAoI) has recently drawn a lot of attention in the context of quantitative assessment of information freshness in status update systems. In this paper, we study a probabilistically preemptive bufferless M/PH/1/1 queue fed with information update packets from $N$ separate information sources for which a new information packet arrival from source- $m$ is allowed to preempt a packet from source- $n$ in service, with a probability depending on $n$ and $m$. To make the model even more general than the existing ones, we assume a distinct phase-type (PH-type) service time distribution, a distinct packet error and retransmission probability, for each of the information sources. Using sample path arguments and the theory of Markov Fluid Queues (MFQ), the exact distributions of the AoI and PAoI are numerically obtained for each of the sources. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the impact of various system parameters on AoI performance. In the context of a two-source system, we present a methodology on how to optimally choose the preemption probabilities and packet generation rates so as to minimize certain AoI-oriented cost functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both information age and delay are critical performance metrics of emerging time-sensitive applications. However, their inherent correlation in the finite block length (FBL) regime has remained uninvestigated as it is affected by block length and update rate in a complex manner. In this paper, closed-form expressions for average age of information (AoI), peak AoI (PAoI) and delay are derived for an FBL Last-Come First-Served system with retransmission and non-preemption policies, based on which a comprehensive analysis of the relationship among the three metrics in the FBL regime is presented. It is proved that there exists a strong tradeoff between delay and AoI/PAoI given a block length, and that AoI, PAoI and delay have positive correlation given an update rate, regardless of the weight. With the goal of minimizing delay and AoI simultaneously, the weighted sum of delay and PAoI (upper bound on AoI) is formulated and proved to be convex with respect to block length and update rate. A low-complexity optimization algorithm is developed with a closed-form expression of the optimal update rate, whose performance approaches the Pareto boundaries of the PAoI-delay and the AoI-delay regions, at much lower complexity than exhaustive search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grant-free access, in which channels are accessed without undergoing assignment through a handshake process, is a promising solution to support massive connectivity needed for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, we consider uplink grant-free massive access for an IoT network with multiple channels. To be specific, the IoT devices generate short packets and have grant-free non-orthogonal access to a channel to transmit the generated packets to a base station (BS). With the aim of keeping the information fresh at the BS, we first derive the age of information (AoI) for grant-free short-packet communications, and then formulate the AoI minimization problem. However, the problem is challenging as the number of users involved is large, and to tackle this problem efficiently, we propose a mean-field evolutionary game-based approach. In this approach, the average behavior of the IoT devices is considered rather than their individual behaviors, and the dynamics of the strategies of the IoT devices are modeled by an evolutionary process. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed mean-field evolutionary game-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the average age of information in G/G/1/1 systems under two service discipline models. In the first model, if a new update arrives when the service is busy, it is blocked; in the second model, a new update preempts the current update in service. For the blocking model, we first derive an exact age expression for G/G/1/1 systems. Then, using the age expression for G/G/1/1 systems, we calculate average age expressions for special cases, i.e., M/G/1/1 and G/M/1/1 systems. We observe that deterministic interarrivals minimize the average age of G/M/1/1 systems for a given mean interarrival time. Next, for the preemption in service model, we first derive an exact average age expression for G/G/1/1 systems. Then, similar to blocking discipline, using the age expression for G/G/1/1 systems, we calculate average age expressions for special cases, i.e., M/G/1/1 and G/M/1/1 systems. Average age for G/M/1/1 can be written as a summation of two terms, the first of which depends only on the first and second moments of interarrival times and the second of which depends only on the service rate. In other words, interarrival and service times are decoupled. We prove that deterministic interarrivals are optimum for G/M/1/1 systems for a given mean interarrival time. On the other hand, we observe for non-exponential service times that the optimal distribution of interarrival times depends on the relative values of the mean interarrival time and the mean service time. Finally, we propose a simple to calculate upper bound to the average age for the preemption in service discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless closed-loop control is of major significance for future industrial manufacturing. However, control applications pose stringent quality of service requirements for reliable operation. Contrary to traditional ultra-reliable low-latency communications design goals such as low packet loss rates and low latency, research results in the domain of networked control systems (NCS) state that depending on the sampling period, control applications inherently tolerate a few consecutive packet losses. This translates into a better-suited metric to capture control application requirements and therefore a more conclusive design goal for wireless networks: ensuring a maximum age of information (AoI). With a Markov modeling approach, we propose to exploit the tolerance through a novel dynamic multi-connectivity scheme that we term state-aware resource allocation (SARA), which temporally negatively correlates packet losses, thus avoiding long packet loss sequences. Through statistical multiplexing, SARA enables a mean time to failure (MTTF) in the order of years while keeping the per-agent average channel usage close to one, also in a multi-agent setting with competition for resources. Compared with static dual-connectivity, the MTTF can be increased 100-fold whereas the number of required channels reduces by 40%. Our approach also statistically guarantees system-wide AoI distributions, which aid to ensure control performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a connection between the age of information and remote estimation error was found in a sampling problem of Wiener processes: If the sampler has no knowledge of the signal being sampled, the optimal sampling strategy is to minimize the age of information; however, by exploiting causal knowledge of the signal values, it is possible to achieve a smaller estimation error. In this paper, we generalize the previous study by investigating a problem of sampling a stationary Gauss-Markov process named the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process, where we aim to find useful insights for solving the problems of sampling more general signals. The optimal sampling problem is formulated as a constrained continuous-time Markov decision process (MDP) with an uncountable state space. We provide an exact solution to this MDP: The optimal sampling policy is a threshold policy on instantaneous estimation error and the threshold is found. Further, if the sampler has no knowledge of the OU process, the optimal sampling problem reduces to an MDP for minimizing a nonlinear age of information metric. The age-optimal sampling policy is a threshold policy on expected estimation error and the threshold is found. In both problems, the optimal sampling policies can be computed by low-complexity algorithms (e.g., bisection search and Newton’s method), and the curse of dimensionality is circumvented. These results hold for (i) general service time distributions of the queueing server and (ii) sampling problems both with and without a sampling rate constraint. Numerical results are provided to compare different sampling policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider an energy harvesting (EH) sensor that continuously monitors a system and sends time-stamped status update to a destination. The sensor harvests energy from nature and uses it to power its updating operations. The destination keeps track of the system status through the successfully received updates. With the recently introduced information freshness metric “Age of Information” (AoI), our objective is to design optimal online status updating policy to minimize the long-term average AoI at the destination, subject to the energy causality constraint at the sensor. Due to the noisy channel between the sensor and the destination, each transmitted update may be erased with a fixed probability, and the AoI at the destination will be reset to zero only when an update is successfully received. We first consider status updating without feedback available to the sensor and show that the Best-effort Uniform updating (BU) policy is optimal in a broadly defined class of online policies. We then investigate status updating with perfect feedback to the sensor and prove similar optimality of the Best-effort Uniform updating with Retransmission (BUR) policy. In order to prove the optimality of the proposed policies, for each case, we first identify a lower bound on the long-term average AoI among a broad class of online policies, and then construct a sequence of virtual policies to approach the lower bound asymptotically. Since those virtual policies are sub-optimal to the original policy, the original policy is thus optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge caching is an efficient technique for mitigating redundant data transmissions over backhaul links. Contents are constantly evolving, and thus the cached contents should be updated timely to guarantee freshness. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. In this paper, we explore a content resale problem, where a Network Service Provider (NSP) purchases contents from Content Providers (CPs) then sells contents to users. We model the problem as a three-stage sequential problem. Then we decompose the problem into two sub-problems on deciding the contents to be purchased and cached, and the respective prices. We solve the sub-problems through the framework of Stackelberg game and auction respectively. For the content purchase, we consider four different cases to design the auction mechanisms. In the auctions, the NSP has to reveal its private information due to the AoI characteristics. Furthermore, we prove that such disclosure will not bring the loss of the NSP’s utility. Finally, numerical results in different cases are provided to show that the NSP can efficiently exploit the benefit from the knowledge about CPs’ production costs and the competition among CPs under our proposed mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In delay-sensitive industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications, the age of information (AoI) is employed to characterize the freshness of information. Meanwhile, the emerging network function virtualization provides flexibility and agility for service providers to deliver a given network service using a sequence of virtual network functions (VNFs). However, suitable VNF placement and scheduling in these schemes is NP-hard and finding a globally optimal solution by traditional approaches is complex. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has appeared as a viable way to solve such problems. In this paper, we first utilize single agent low-complex compound action actor-critic RL to cover both discrete and continuous actions and jointly minimize VNF cost and AoI in terms of network resources under end-to-end Quality of Service constraints. To surmount the single-agent capacity limitation for learning, we then extend our solution to a multi-agent DRL scheme in which agents collaborate with each other. Simulation results demonstrate that single-agent schemes significantly outperform the greedy algorithm in terms of average network cost and AoI. Moreover, multi-agent solution decreases the average cost by dividing the tasks between the agents. However, it needs more iterations to be learned due to the requirement on the agents’ collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have unlocked numerous sensing applications, which are expected to add billions of dollars to the world economy in the next decade. To further improve the Quality-of-Service in these applications, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has considered the use of terrestrial cellular networks to support UAV sensing services, also known as the cellular Internet of UAVs. In this paper, we consider a cellular Internet of UAVs, where the sensory data can be transmitted either to the base station via cellular links, or to the mobile devices by underlay UAV-to-Device (U2D) communications. To evaluate the freshness of the sensory data, the concept of age of information (AoI) is adopted, in which a lower AoI implies fresher data. Since UAVs’ AoIs are determined by their trajectories during sensing and transmission, we investigate the AoI minimization problem for UAVs by designing their trajectories. This problem is a Markov decision problem with an infinite state-action space, and thus we utilize multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to approximate the state-action space. Then, we propose a multi-UAV trajectory design algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve a lower AoI than a greedy algorithm, policy gradient algorithm, and overlay U2D scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a practical relay model, in which an energy transmitter (ET) transmits energy to a sensory node S and an information receiver D, information freshness or age of information (AoI) under outdated-channel-state-information (oCSI) severity and line-of-sight (LoS) power is examined in this paper. The sensory node—equipped with a finite-size-battery capacitor—harvests energy from the ET to sustain its operation. Rician fading under non-oCSI and oCSI environments is employed to study the AoI, in which benefits and severity of LoS power and oCSI will be elaborated. The proposed AoI results exactly reduce to existing ones under Rayleigh fading, which validates this work. Simulation results are additionally deployed to validate the proposed AoI results. Impact of parameters such as capacitor capacity, system incoherence coefficient and spectral efficiency on AoI under specific scenarios is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of information (AoI) is gaining attention as a valuable performance metric for many IoT systems, in which a large number of devices report time-stamped updates to a central gateway. This is the case, for instance, of remote sensing, monitoring, or tracking, with broad applications in the industrial, vehicular, and environmental domain. In these settings, AoI provides insights that are complementary to those offered by throughput or latency, capturing the ability of the system to maintain an up-to-date view of the status of each transmitting device. From this standpoint, while a good understanding of the metric has been reached for point-to-point links, relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact that link layer solutions employed in IoT systems may have on AoI. In particular, no result is available for modern random access protocols, which have recently emerged as promising solutions to support massive machine-type communications. To start addressing this gap we provide in this paper the first study of the AoI of a scheme in this family, namely irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA). By means of a Markovian analysis, we track the AoI evolution at the gateway, prove that the process is ergodic, and derive a compact closed form expression for its stationary distribution. Leaning on this, we compute exact formulations for the average AoI and the age violation probability. The study reveals non-trivial design trade-offs for IRSA and highlights the key role played by the protocol operating frame size. Moreover, a comparison with the performance of a simpler slotted ALOHA strategy highlights a remarkable potential for modern random access schemes in terms of information freshness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a joint sampling and scheduling problem for optimizing data freshness in multi-source systems. Data freshness is measured by a non-decreasing penalty function of age of information, where all sources have the same age-penalty function. Sources take turns to generate update packets, and forward them to their destinations one-by-one through a shared channel with random delay. There is a scheduler, that chooses the update order of the sources, and a sampler, that determines when a source should generate a new packet in its turn. We aim to find the optimal scheduler-sampler pairs that minimize the total-average age-penalty at delivery times (Ta-APD) and the total-average age-penalty (Ta-AP). We prove that the Maximum Age First (MAF) scheduler and the zero-wait sampler are jointly optimal for minimizing the Ta-APD. Meanwhile, the MAF scheduler and a relative value iteration with reduced complexity (RVI-RC) sampler are jointly optimal for minimizing the Ta-AP. The RVI-RC sampler is based on a relative value iteration algorithm whose complexity is reduced by exploiting a threshold property in the optimal sampler. Finally, a low-complexity threshold-type sampler is devised via an approximate analysis of Bellman’s equation. This threshold-type sampler reduces to a simple water-filling sampler for a linear age-penalty function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization of information freshness in wireless networks has usually been performed based on queueing analysis that captures only the temporal traffic dynamics associated with the transmitters and receivers. However, the effect of interference, which is mainly dominated by the interferers’ geographic locations, is not well understood. In this paper, we leverage a spatiotemporal model, which allows one to characterize the age of information (AoI) from a joint queueing-geometry perspective, for the design of a decentralized scheduling policy that exploits local observation to make transmission decisions that minimize the AoI. To quantify the performance, we also derive accurate and tractable expressions for the peak AoI. Numerical results reveal that: i) the packet arrival rate directly affects the service process due to queueing interactions, ii) the proposed scheme can adapt to traffic variations and largely reduce the peak AoI, and iii) the proposed scheme scales well as the network grows in size. This is done by adaptively adjusting the radio access probability at each transmitter to the change of the ambient environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of information and communication technology (ICT) on development have been studied primarily from the perspective of their contributions to a country's economic growth. However, ICT can offer individuals much more than just monetary income-it can improve many aspects of their quality of life. In fact, according to the human development paradigm, income is only one resource that helps individuals to satisfy their economic needs. Using the capabilities approach as a theoretical framework, this study applied data panel technique to a sample of 145 countries to investigate how the use and adoption of ICT, by individuals, enterprises, and governments, affects human development, as measured by the Social Progress Index and Human Development Index (HDI). The results show that regardless of a country's level of development, the individual use of ICT has a positive impact on human development; especially on the dimensions measured by HDI (having a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable, and having a decent standard of living). Furthermore, the use of ICTs for commercial purposes has a positive impact on human development at the global level, but if we make the analysis considering only developed countries, the relationship of this variable with human development is no longer significant. Regarding the impact of government use of ICT on human development, it has been verified that it is significant on developed countries. This study can be used as a tool by policymakers, especially in developing countries, to reinforce their intentions to support the use and implementation of ICTs.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is a promising paradigm to enable information sharing and acquisition among vehicles. Since information freshness has significantly influence on task scheduling, an emerging metric, named the age of information (AoI), has been utilized to evaluate it. Recent research generally focuses on AoI minimization but pays little attention to information personality. However, different impacts caused by distinct information may be posed on user decisions. This article first briefly introduces the state of the art of imitation learning in wireless networks. After that, an imitation-learning-based online task scheduling scheme is designed with the support of VEC. It intends to minimize the average age of critical information (AoCI), referring to the age of information that has significant impacts on vehicle decisions. Performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme outperforms other algorithms from several aspects. At last, we discuss several potential research challenges and open issues for artificial intelligence in the Internet of Vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of Information (AoI) is a critical metric for several Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where sensors keep track of the environment by sending updates that need to be as fresh as possible. The development of edge computing solutions has moved the monitoring process closer to the sensor, reducing the communication delays, but the processing time of the edge node needs to be taken into account. Furthermore, a reliable system design in terms of freshness requires the knowledge of the full distribution of the Peak AoI (PAoI), from which the probability of occurrence of rare, but extremely damaging events can be obtained. In this work, we model the communication and computation delay of such a system as two First Come First Serve (FCFS) queues in tandem, analytically deriving the full distribution of the PAoI for the M/M/1 – M/D/1 and the M/M/1 – M/M/1 tandems, which can represent a wide variety of realistic scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We summarize recent contributions in the broad area of age of information (AoI). In particular, we describe the current state of the art in the design and optimization of low-latency cyberphysical systems and applications in which sources send time-stamped status updates to interested recipients. These applications desire status updates at the recipients to be as timely as possible; however, this is typically constrained by limited system resources. We describe AoI timeliness metrics and present general methods of AoI evaluation analysis that are applicable to a wide variety of sources and systems. Starting from elementary single-server queues, we apply these AoI methods to a range of increasingly complex systems, including energy harvesting sensors transmitting over noisy channels, parallel server systems, queueing networks, and various single-hop and multi-hop wireless networks. We also explore how update age is related to MMSE methods of sampling, estimation and control of stochastic processes. The paper concludes with a review of efforts to employ age optimization in cyberphysical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we investigate information freshness in a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link. Initially, we study the properties of a sample path of the age of information (AoI) process at the destination. We obtain a general formula of the stationary distribution of the AoI, under the assumption of ergodicity. We relate this result to a discrete time queueing system and provide a general expression of the generating function of AoI in relation with the system time and the peak age of information (PAoI) metric. Furthermore, we consider three different single-server system models and we obtain closed-form expressions of the generating functions and the stationary distributions of the AoI and the PAoI. The first model is a first-come-first-served (FCFS) queue, the second model is a preemptive last-come-first-served (LCFS) queue, and the last model is a bufferless system with packet dropping. We build upon these results to provide a methodology for analyzing general non-linear age functions for this type of systems, using representations of functions as power series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scheduling the transmission of time-sensitive information from a source node to multiple users over error-prone communication channels is studied with the goal of minimizing the long-term average age of information (AoI) at the users. A long-term average resource constraint is imposed on the source, which limits the average number of transmissions. The source can transmit only to a single user at each time slot, and after each transmission, it receives an instantaneous ACK/NACK feedback from the intended receiver, and decides when and to which user to transmit the next update. Assuming the channel statistics are known, the optimal scheduling policy is studied for both the standard automatic repeat request (ARQ) and hybrid ARQ (HARQ) protocols. Then, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach is introduced to find a near-optimal policy, which does not assume any a priori information on the random processes governing the channel states. Different RL methods including average-cost SARSA with linear function approximation (LFA), upper confidence reinforcement learning (UCRL2), and deep Q-network (DQN) are applied and compared through numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a base station supporting two types of traffics, i.e., status update traffic and timely throughput traffic. The goal is to improve the information freshness of status update traffic while satisfying timely throughput constraints. Age of Information (AoI) is adopted as a metric for information freshness. We first propose an age-aware policy that makes scheduling decisions based on the current value of AoI directly. Given timely throughput constraint, an upper bound of the weighted average AoI under this policy is provided. To evaluate policy performance, it is important to obtain the minimum weighted average AoI achievable given timely throughput constraint. A low complexity method is proposed to estimate a lower bound of this value. Furthermore, inspired by the estimation procedure, we design an age-oblivious policy that does not rely on the current AoI to make scheduling decisions. Surprisingly, simulation results show that the weighted average AoI of the age-oblivious policy is comparable to that of the age-aware policy, and both are close to the lower bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of real-time cyberphysical systems, status updates are becoming an important form of communication. Vehicular messaging, security reports from homes and offices, surveillance video, and video feedback from remote-controlled systems all represent status updates at networked monitors that need to be as timely as possible. However, this is typically constrained by limited network resources. This tension has led to the introduction of new performance metrics based on the Age of Information (AoI) that capture how timely is one’s knowledge of an entity or process. Optimization based on AoI metrics of both the networks and the senders’ updating policies has yielded new and even surprising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the concept of fresh data trading, in which a destination user requests, and pays for, fresh data updates from a source provider, and data freshness is captured by the age of information (AoI) metric. Keeping data fresh relies on costly frequent data updates by the source, which motivates the source to price fresh data. In this work, the destination incurs an age-related cost, modeled as a general increasing function of the AoI. The source designs a pricing mechanism to maximize its profit, while the destination chooses a data update schedule to trade off its payments to the source and its age-related cost. Depending on different real-time applications and scenarios, we study both a finite-horizon model and an infinite-horizon model with time discounting. The key challenge of designing the optimal pricing scheme lies in the destination’s time-interdependent valuations, due to the nature of AoI, and the infinite-dimensional dynamic optimization. To this end, we exploit three different dimensions in designing pricing by studying three pricing schemes: a time-dependent pricing scheme, in which the price for each update depends on when it is requested; a quantity-based pricing scheme, in which the price of each update depends on how many updates have been previously requested; and a simple subscription-based pricing scheme, in which the price per update is constant but the source charges an additional subscription fee. Our analysis reveals that (1) the optimal subscription-based pricing maximizes the source’s profit among all possible pricing schemes under both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon models; (2) the optimal quantity-based pricing scheme is only optimal with a finite horizon; and (3) the time-dependent pricing scheme, under the infinite-horizon model with significant time discounting, is asymptotically optimal. Numerical results show that the profit-maximizing pricing schemes can also lead to significant reductions in AoI and social costs, and that a moderate degree of time discounting is enough to achieve a close-to-optimal time-dependent pricing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a comprehensive steady-state analysis of threshold-ALOHA, a distributed age-aware modification of slotted ALOHA proposed in recent literature. In threshold-ALOHA, each terminal suspends its transmissions until the Age of Information (AoI) of the status update flow it is sending reaches a certain threshold Γ. Once the age exceeds Γ, the terminal attempts transmission with constant probability τ in each slot, as in standard slotted ALOHA. We analyze the time-average expected AoI attained by this policy, and explore its scaling with network size, n. We derive the probability distribution of the number of active users at steady state, and show that as network size increases the policy converges to one that runs slotted ALOHA with fewer sources: on average about one fifth of the users is active at any time. We obtain an expression for steady-state expected AoI and use this to optimize the parameters Γ and τ, resolving the conjectures in previous literature by confirming that the optimal age threshold and transmission probability are 2.2n and 4.69/n, respectively. We find that the optimal AoI scales with the network size as 1.4169n, which is almost half the minimum AoI achievable with slotted ALOHA, while the loss from the maximum throughput of e−1 remains below 1%. We compare the performance of this rudimentary algorithm to that of the SAT policy that dynamically adapts its transmission probabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]