Unreliable Multi-hop Networks Routing Protocol For Age of Information-Sensitive Communication

It is an important problem to study multi-hop communication networks with unreliable links and various nodes forwarding costs, where the freshness of the messages is significant. On unreliable networks, existing time-sensitive utility-based routing protocols provide efficient routing based on a simple utility model that is linear with time. In this work, we introduce an Age of Information (AoI)-sensitive utility model for unreliable networks, in which each periodically generated message has an attached time-sensitive total utility that decays over time following the AoI model. This model provides a good balance between cost and delay. We propose an optimal routing algorithm that guarantees the total expected utility of the messages would be maximized. Our algorithm maximizes expected utilities by forwarding the messages via nodes along the optimal path whenever the beneficial reward will cover the expected total decrease in utility, and dropping them whenever it would not. Finally, we conduct a simulation to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm.