Age-Effective Information Updating Over Intermittently Connected MANETs

Immediately after the occurrence of a natural disaster, communication infrastructures used in daily life become temporarily unavailable. Under such a situation, intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) play an important role in providing post-disaster networking. While previous studies on such networks have mainly focused on one-to-one messaging applications, the importance of monitoring applications has become increasingly important in recent years. For monitoring applications, the key performance measure is given by the freshness of the information, rather than the traditional delay characteristics. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis of the age of information (AoI) for intermittently connected MANETs, which captures the information freshness of monitoring applications. We further investigate basic principles in the network design based on the analytical results obtained. In particular, we discuss the AoI-energy tradeoff from different perspectives of source and relay nodes.