Optimizing Information Freshness in Computing-Enabled IoT Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the key features of the next-generation wireless networks, where timely delivery of status update packets is essential for many real-time IoT applications. To provide users with context-aware services and lighten the transmission burden, the raw data usually need to be preprocessed before being transmitted to the destination. However, the effect of computing on the overall information freshness is not well understood. In this article, we first develop an analytical framework to investigate the information freshness, in terms of peak age of information (PAoI), of a computing-enabled IoT system with multiple sensors. Specifically, we model the procedure of computing and transmission as a tandem queue and derive the analytical expressions of the average PAoI for different sensors. Based on the theoretical results, we formulate a min-max optimization problem to minimize the maximum average PAoI of different sensors. We further design a derivative-free algorithm to find the optimal updating frequency, with which the complexity for checking the convexity of the formulated problem or obtaining the derivatives of the object function can be largely reduced. The accuracy of our analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are verified with extensive simulation results.