Packet Management of the Receiver for Information Freshness in Real-Time Systems

The proliferation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications has significantly boosted the need for fresh information to guarantee good real-time performance. To characterize the freshness of information in time-critical systems, the concept of the age of information (AoI) has been proposed. Based on minimizing AoI, most research has designed information update policies from the perspective of the source to keep data fresh. In this work, we find that actively discarding some packets at the receiver can reduce AoI as well, which motivates us to develop this idea. By introducing a packet dropping threshold at the receiver, we formulate an AoI minimization problem. Then, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach has priority on decreasing the average AoI.