Random Activation Control for Priority AoI

Internet of Things (IoT) represents one of the most significant paradigm shifts recently, with several heterogeneous services and applications to the ultimate realization of connected living. In many status-sensitive IoT services, information usually has a higher value when it is fresher. A new metric, termed the age of information (AoI), was proposed to capture the freshness of status updates. In this paper, we propose a novel online control weight-based age-dependent activation control (W-ADAC) algorithm that prioritizes the activation of the devices that are divided into different classes possibly according to different AoI requirements. With the proposed W-ADAC, we introduce the concept of weighted AoI which is applied to control the activation probability of each device. In particular, higher weights are given to the devices that manifest higher priority requirements. As it is hard to obtain the system weighted AoI due to a lack of information on the distributed devices, we further introduce the capability of estimating the system weighted AoI into the proposed W-ADAC. Extensive simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed W-ADAC over multiple priorities and confirm that the proposed algorithm not only improves the overall system throughput but also provides the near-minimum AoI.