Distributed Real-Time Control for Minimizing AoI in Random Access Networks

The freshness of information is crucial for IoT applications, such as remote sensing systems and real-time status updates. The overabundance of stale information at the destination can potentially compromise the accuracy and reliability of system decision-making processes. To address this concern, a new metric termed the Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to capture the freshness of status updates. In this article, we present an analytical framework to establish a dual-action guideline for minimizing the average AoI in random access networks. We then utilize this guideline to propose two online activation control protocols: 1) the age-dependent activation control (ADAC) algorithm and 2) the threshold-based ADAC (T-ADAC) algorithm. The former prioritizes the activation of devices with higher instantaneous AoI, while the latter enables a device to be active with a dynamic probability only when its instantaneous AoI is beyond a predetermined threshold. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADAC and T-ADAC, showing that our proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art approaches in random access networks. Specifically, the proposed methods can achieve maximum throughput and minimum average AoI, showcasing their superior performance in real-world scenarios.