To Buffer or Not To Buffer: IEEE 802.11p/bd Performance Under Different Buffering Strategies

A fundamental paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT) consists of agents that communicate updates to each other to perform joint actions, e.g., cooperative awareness in transportation systems, swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), fleet of robots, automated assembly lines and logistics. A common feature of update messaging is emphasis on reliable throughput and freshness of collected data. We develop an analytical model that yields accurate predictions of all relevant metrics, both in terms of moments and probability distributions, for the case of one-hop broadcast update messages exchanged by using a CSMA-based wireless network. The model is validated against simulations and then applied to compare two update message scheduling approaches: providing a minimal buffer resource or providing no buffer. Surprisingly, we prove that having no buffer improves Age of Information (AoI) performance as well as message delivery rate, in spite of dropped packets. This is essentially due to much smaller congestion and hence collision probability in the wireless channel. From a system point of view this suggests a simple design of message handling, with no need of buffering and overwriting older messages. From a modeling point of view, the result supports the definition of simpler models that need not keep into account buffer state.