Status Prediction and Data Aggregation for AoI-Oriented Short-Packet Transmission in Industrial IoT

Age of information (AoI) is an effective performance metric for time-critical industrial Internet of things (IIoT) applications. We investigate status prediction and data aggregation with prediction error awareness, to enhance the AoI performance for short-packet transmission (SPT) in time-critical IIoT. A predict-compare (PredComp) transmission scheme is proposed, where proactive transmission termination is employed in case of prediction error, by comparing the predicted and real updates at source. It is proved to achieve a significant average AoI performance gain over the case without prediction, even under high prediction error probability. In addition, a predict-aggregate-compare (PredAggComp) transmission scheme is proposed, where two status updates are predicted with different prediction horizons and aggregated by utilizing their time correlation. That allows a good tradeoff between the prediction accuracy and the transmission error probability. A closed-form threshold that the PredAggComp scheme outperforms the PredComp scheme is derived. Moreover, prediction horizon adaptation is conducted to minimize the average AoI of the proposed transmission schemes. Simulation results verify the analytical results and show the superiority of the proposed PredComp and PredAggComp schemes, with an average AoI reduction of up to 64% over the case without prediction.