Boosting or Hindering: AoI and Throughput Interrelation in Routing-Aware Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

While considerable work has addressed the optimal AoI under different circumstances in single-hop networks, the exploration of AoI in multi-hop wireless networks is rarely attempted. More importantly, the inherent relationships between AoI and throughput are yet to be explored, especially in multi-hop networks. This paper studies AoI in multi-hop wireless networks and explores its potential relationships with throughput for the very first time, particularly focusing on the impacts of flexible routes on the two metrics, i.e., AoI and throughput. By developing a rigorous mathematical model with interference, channel allocation, link scheduling, and routing path selection taken into consideration, we build the interrelation between AoI and throughput in multi-hop networks. A multi-criteria optimization problem is formulated with the goal of simultaneously minimizing AoI and maximizing network throughput. By qualitatively analyzing their relationships, we exhibit that the two metrics may conflict with each other, implying the optimal solutions for the multi-criteria problem will include a set of Pareto-optimal points rather than a single point existing in the traditional optimization problem. We resort to a novel approach by transforming the multi-criteria problem into a single objective one so as to find the weakly Pareto-optimal points iteratively, thereby allowing us to screen all Pareto-optimal points for the solution. Through formal proof, our solution is demonstrated to be able to identify all Pareto-optimal points and terminate in a finite number of iterations. We conduct the simulation evaluation to identify the optimal tradeoff points of AoI and throughput, demonstrating that one performance metric may improve at the expense of degrading the other, with the routing path found as one of the key factors in determining such a tradeoff.