Decode-and-Forward Short-Packet Relaying in the Internet of Things: Timely Status Updates

In this paper, a decode-and-forward (DF) short-packet relaying model is developed to achieve timely status updates for intelligent monitoring within the Internet of Things (IoT), where the status updates generated at an IoT device are delivered to a remote server with the aid of a relay in both half-duplex (HD) and full-duplex (FD) modes. To characterise the data freshness of status updates, we exploit the age of information (AoI) as a metric, which is defined as the time elapsed since the generation of the latest successfully decoded status update. The average AoI is formulated and minimised for both HD-DF and FD-DF relaying IoT networks in finite blocklength regime. For the HD-DF relaying, we introduce a perfect approximation of the average AoI to solve the problem of average AoI minimisation with the optimal blocklengths in two phases. For the FD-DF relaying, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve the problem of average AoI minimisation by optimising the relay’s transmit power and the blocklength. Illustrative numerical results not only substantiate the validity of our proposed algorithms, but also provide useful references for the IoT monitoring network design, specifically for the transmit power thresholds at the IoT device and the relay.