Ensuring Data Freshness in Wireless Monitoring Networks: Age-of-Information Sensitive Coverage and Energy Efficiency Perspectives

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of Things, the sensor usage has been elevated to a new level, and it becomes more crucial to maintain reliable sensor networks. In this article, we provide how to efficiently and reliably manage the sensor monitoring system for ensuring data freshness. A sensor transmits its sensing information regularly to the data center (DC), and the sensed information generally has the correlation over the space and the time. Hence, the accuracy of the estimated information from the sensed information decreases as the target location for information estimation is further away from the sensor or the Age of Information (AoI), the elapsed time from the information generation, increases. Therefore, by considering the effect of the AoI and the distance from the sensor on the estimation error, we newly define an error-tolerable sensing (ETS) coverage as the area that the estimated information at the DC is with smaller error than the target value. To analyze the impact of the AoI on the ETS coverage, we derive the $\eta $ -coverage probability, which is the probability that the ETS coverage is greater than $\eta $ ratio of the maximum sensor coverage, and the average ETS coverage. We also provide the optimal transmission power of the sensor, which minimizes the average energy consumption while guaranteeing certain level of the $\eta $ -coverage probability. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and show the tendency of the optimal transmission power according to the maximum number of retransmissions. This article can pave the way to efficient design of the AoI-sensitive sensor networks. © 2023 IEEE.