Computational Modeling of Age of Information for Cyber-physical Systems

In Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a new field of network research. The concept AoI represents the freshness of the knowledge a monitor has about a process, whose updates are sent by one or more sources. In this context, this work proposes a formal computational model and a tool to simulate a network of queues, to evaluate mean and peak AoI in CPS, where analytical models are not always feasible. In addition to the computational model, this work also proposes a technique for estimating the precision of the results obtained in the simulation, which is fundamental for better results and is not available or feasible in analytical models. The proposed tool obtained results that were compared with existing analytical models, using different queuing policies and packet management techniques. The simulation results validate the proposed tool and are a first step for a more complete CPS analysis.