Optimizing Age of Information in Random-Access Poisson Networks

Timeliness is an emerging requirement for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In IoT networks with a large number of nodes, severe interference may incur that leads to Age-of-Information (AoI) degradation. It is, therefore, important to study how to optimize the AoI performance. This article focuses on the AoI minimization in random-access Poisson networks. By considering the spatiotemporal interactions amongst the transmitters, an expression of the peak AoI is derived, based on which the optimal peak AoI and the corresponding optimal packet arrival rate and channel access probability are further characterized. The analysis shows that when the channel access probability (resp., the packet arrival rate) is given, the optimal packet arrival rate (resp., the optimal channel access probability) is equal to one when nodes are sparsely deployed, and decreases as the node deployment density increases. With a joint tuning of these two system parameters, the optimal channel access probability always equals one. Moreover, with the sole tuning of the channel access probability, the optimal peak AoI is improved with a smaller packet arrival rate only when the node deployment density is high. In contrast, a higher channel access probability always improves peak AoI performance when the packet arrival rate is solely tuned. The analysis in this article sheds important light on freshness-aware design for large-scale networks.