Age of Information of One-Hop Broadcast Communications in a CSMA Network

We consider a network of agents that send periodic updates to their neighbors. A trade-off between load on the shared communication channel and data timeliness is obtained by looking at the Age of Information (AoI) metric. We develop a model of a Carrier-Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) network with partial sensing, to calculate the AoI of one-hop broadcast messages exchanged among the agents. The model is applied to beacon messages in a vehicular network to gain insight into the impact of system parameters.