Impact of Transmission Cost on Age of Information at Nash Equilibrium in Slotted ALOHA

This letter presents an evaluation of slotted ALOHA using game theory to capture the strategic choices of the nodes, considered as independent agents that attempt to obtain updates from a shared source, with collisions preventing them from getting a usable update. Their objectives are to minimize the sum of the average age of information and a transmission cost term. The latter is an important addition to the model, shown to achieve better coordination among the nodes, so that, while the price of anarchy of the system is unbounded, a limited price of stability, approaching 1 for increasing cost, can be obtained.