Minimizing Age of Collection for Multiple Access in Wireless Industrial Internet of Things

This article investigates the information freshness of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems, where each IoT device makes a partial observation of a common target and transmits the information update to a central receiver to recover the complete observation. We consider the Age of Collection (AoC) performance as a measure of information freshness. Unlike the conventional Age of Information (AoI) metric, the instantaneous AoC decreases only when all cooperative packets for a common observation are successfully received. Hence, effectively allocating wireless time-frequency resources among IoT devices to achieve a low average AoC at the central receiver is paramount. Three multiple access schemes are considered in this article: 1) time-division multiple access (TDMA) without retransmission; 2) TDMA with retransmission; and 3) frequency-division multiple access (FDMA). First, our theoretical analysis indicates that TDMA with retransmission outperforms the other two schemes in terms of average AoC. Subsequently, we implement information update systems based on the three schemes on software-defined radios. Experimental results demonstrate that considering the medium access control (MAC) overhead in practice, FDMA achieves a lower average AoC than TDMA with or without retransmission in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In contrast, TDMA with retransmission provides a stable and relatively low average AoC over a wide SNR range, which is favorable for IIoT applications. Overall, we present a theoretical-plus-experimental investigation of AoC in IIoT information update systems.