On the Minimization of Non-Linear Age of Information in the Internet of Things

In this paper, a novel centralized resource allocation scheme is proposed to enable a wireless base station to adapt to heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) environments and manage scarce communication resources to ensure timely delivery of IoT device data. In the considered system, the timeliness of information is determined using non-linear age of information (AoI) metrics that can naturally quantify the freshness of information. To capture the inherent heterogeneity of the IoT system, non-linear aging functions are proposed and designed specifically for IoT devices having different types of messages. To minimize AoI, the proposed centralized scheme allocates the limited communication resources considering AoI and enables the base station to learn the device types. Furthermore, the proposed centralized resource management scheme with different activation probabilities, outage probabilities, and heterogeneity levels is analyzed in terms of the average instantaneous AoI. Simulation results show that the proposed centralized allocation scheme effectively decreases the average instantaneous AoI in a massive IoT with high outage probability and high heterogeneity.