Protocol Design for Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA With Energy Harvesting to Maintain Information Freshness

2024-11-03

arXiv.org

AI Summary

In energy-harvesting Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, energy shortages cause implicit transmission failures—undetected by conventional protocols—degrading information freshness, quantified by Age of Information (AoI). Method: This paper proposes an AoI-aware Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA (IRSA) random access protocol. It introduces a novel receiver-side mechanism that perfectly identifies implicit failures induced by energy unavailability and jointly optimizes the IRSA degree distribution to suppress error propagation under stringent energy constraints. Contribution/Results: Theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations demonstrate that, under realistic energy-harvesting models, the proposed scheme achieves an average AoI approaching the theoretical lower bound of an infinite-energy system—significantly outperforming conventional IRSA configurations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve asymptotically optimal AoI performance in energy-constrained IoT networks.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs

Abstract

We investigate an internet-of-things system where energy-harvesting devices send status updates to a common receiver using the irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA) protocol. Energy shortages in these devices may lead to transmission failures that are unknown to the receiver, disrupting the decoding process. To address this issue, we propose a method for the receiver to perfectly identify such failures. Furthermore, we optimize the degree distribution of the protocol to enhance the freshness of the status updates. Our optimized degree distribution mitigates the adverse effects of potential transmission failures. Numerical results demonstrate that, despite energy-harvesting constraints, IRSA can achieve a level of information freshness comparable to systems with unlimited energy.

Problem

• Energy Harvesting
• Internet of Things
• Information Freshness

Innovation

• IRSA
• Environmental Energy Harvesting
• Information Freshness