Age of information of a server with energy requirements.

Josu Doncel

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.354

Abstract

We investigate a system with Poisson arrivals to two queues. One queue stores the status updates of the process of interest (or data packets) and the other handles the energy that is required to deliver the updates to the monitor. We consider that the energy is represented by packets of discrete unit. When an update ends service, it is sent to the energy queue and, if the energy queue has one packet, the update is delivered successfully and the energy packet disappears; however, in case the energy queue is empty, the update is lost. Both queues can handle, at most, one packet and the service time of updates is exponentially distributed. Using the Stochastic Hybrid System method, we characterize the average Age of Information of this system. Due to the difficulty of the derived expression, we also explore approximations of the average Age of Information of this system.

Highlights

Motivation The Age of Information has been introduced recently as a metric to measure the freshness of information in applications in which a monitor at the destination is interested in having timely updates about a process of interest in the source
Contributions In this article, we study the average Age of Information of a queueing system that is formed by two queues: one queue stores the updates of the system of interest and the other stores the energy that is required to deliver the status updates to the monitor
We consider that an update is sent to the energy queue when it ends the service and, if there is an available energy packet, the status update is transferred to the monitor, whereas if the energy queue is empty, the update is lost

Summary

Introduction

Motivation The Age of Information has been introduced recently as a metric to measure the freshness of information in applications in which a monitor at the destination is interested in having timely updates about a process of interest in the source. We analyze the Age of Information of a queueing system with energy requirements, that is, we consider that the communication system needs some energy to deliver the status updates of the source to the monitor. There has been a big increase of energy usage that come from renewal sources, such as solar or wind and this growth will continue in the near future. This kind of energy sources are known to be very volatile. A solution to this problem that has been presented in the last years

Objectives

Conclusion