Optimizing Worst Case Data Freshness in RF-Powered Networked Embedded Systems

Maintaining real-time data freshness plays a critical role in ensuring system correctness and optimizing the system performance in networked embedded systems (NESs). To quantitatively measure the freshness of the collected real-time data, the concept of Age of Information (AoI) has been extensively studied in recent years. This article explores how to minimize the worst case AoI of real-time data in radio-frequency (RF)-powered NESs. In such systems, one hybrid access point (HAP) transfers wireless power to a set of distributed sensor nodes, and in the meantime, receives the information from these sensor nodes. We utilize the metric of AoI to measure the data freshness and present a comprehensive analysis of the worst case AoI of the real-time data in the target system. Based on the analysis, an optimal energy schedule solution is designed to judiciously determine individual sensor nodes’ energy and time allocation to minimize the worst case AoI. Considering the varying importance of different information and sensor nodes in the target system, we further propose the optimal time and energy allocation scheme for minimizing the weighted worst case AoI. A multinode RF-powered NES testbed is implemented to validate the functional correctness of our solutions. The results show that our solutions significantly outperform the state-of-the-art solutions, reducing the worst case AoI and weighted worst case AoI by 69.3% and 75.1% on average, respectively.