Age of Information Aware Channel Allocation for Wireless Industrial Networks

Wireless industrial networks have been deemed as a promising solution in the new round of industrial revolution with digitalization, networking and intellectualization of manufacturing industry. However, in order to meet the stringent requirement on the reliable and low latency information delivery, the wireless resource should be carefully managed across the overall networks. In this paper, we consider the software defined network (SDN) architecture for the wireless industrial networks, whereby the network states and wireless spectrum usage of the overall network can be monitored continuously, and thus channel allocation strategy can be adjusted wisely in a judicious way. In order to characterize the timeliness requirement for information delivery, we adopt the age of information (AoI) as a measure of the information freshness, and an AoI aware channel allocation problem is formulated accordingly. Two efficient heuristic algorithms are designed for this NP-hard problem, and simulation results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes.