A Game Theoretic Approach to Age of Information in Modern Random Access Systems

The age of information is a performance metric describing the freshness of updates, and is of particular interest for remote sensing scenarios involving high number of nodes, as is expected to happen, e.g., in emergency scenarios or industrial applications of the Internet of Things. Only recently, this metric received a rigorous treatment in the context of modern random access techniques that are realistic for this kind of systems. In this paper, we extend these investigations from the perspective of game theory, to discuss the role of individual strategic choices on the resulting system performance. We highlight how the introduction and fine-tuning of some parameters, specifically a cost for transmission from the nodes, can regulate the overall performance and achieve system-wide efficient allocations that are also equilibria for the selfish needs of the individual users.