The Age of Information: Real-Time Status Updating by Multiple Sources

We examine multiple independent sources providing status updates to a monitor through simple queues. We formulate an age of information (AoI) timeliness metric and derive a general result for the AoI that is applicable to a wide variety of multiple source service systems. For first-come first-served...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on information theory Vol. 65; no. 3; pp. 1807 - 1827
Main Authors Yates, Roy D., Kaul, Sanjit K.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.03.2019
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Age of information
Automobiles
communication networks
Hybrid systems
Markov analysis
Markov chains
Measurement
Monitoring
Queueing analysis
queueing systems
Queues
Queuing theory
Sensors
Servers
stochastic hybrid systems
Wireless communication
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Summary:We examine multiple independent sources providing status updates to a monitor through simple queues. We formulate an age of information (AoI) timeliness metric and derive a general result for the AoI that is applicable to a wide variety of multiple source service systems. For first-come first-served and two types of last-come first-served systems with Poisson arrivals and exponential service times, we find the region of feasible average status ages for multiple updating sources. We then use these results to characterize how a service facility can be shared among multiple updating sources. A new simplified technique for evaluating the AoI in finite-state continuous-time queuing systems is also derived. Based on stochastic hybrid systems, this method makes AoI evaluation to be comparable in complexity to finding the stationary distribution of a finite-state Markov chain.
ISSN:0018-9448
1557-9654
DOI:10.1109/TIT.2018.2871079