In status update scenarios, the freshness of information is measured in terms of age-of-information (AoI), which essentially reflects the timeliness for real-time applications to to transmit status update packets to a remote controller. For some applications, computational expensive and time consuming data processing is inevitable for status information of packets to be displayed. Mobile edge servers are equipped with adequate computation resources and they are placed close to users. Thus, mobile edge computing (MEC) can be a promising technology to reduce AoI for computation-intensive messages. In this paper, we study the AoI for computation-intensive messages with MEC, and consider three computing schemes: local computing, remote computing at MEC server, and partial computing, i.e., some part of computing tasks is performed locally, and the rest is executed at MEC server. Zero-wait policy is adopted in all three schemes. Specifically, in local computing, a new message is generated immediately after the previous one is revealed by computing. While in remote computing and partial computing, a new message is generated once the previous one is received by the remote MEC server. With infinite queue size and exponentially distributed transmission time, closed-form average AoI for exponentially distributed computing time is derived for the three computing schemes. For deterministic computing time, the averageAoIisanalyzednumerically.Simulationresultsshowthat by carefully partitioning the computing tasks, the average AoI in partial computing is the smallest compared to local computing and remote computing. The results also indicate numerically the conditions on which remote computing attains smaller average AoI compared with local computing.
Age of information (AoI) is a fundamentally important metric to characterize the freshness of information in real-time Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring systems. Another important metric is the energy cost for information sensing and transmission. In this paper, we investigate the average AoI and energy cost for low-density parity-check coded status update with and without automatic repeat request (ARQ), where the fixed redundancy scheme is employed. The non-ARQ, classical ARQ, truncated ARQ, and truncated hybrid ARQ with Chase combining (HARQ-CC) schemes are analyzed and compared. By using the renewal processes theory, the expressions for the average AoI as well as the average energy cost of each considered scheme are derived. Both the lower bound of age and the upper bound of energy are provided. It is shown through simulation results that the average AoI and energy cost are mainly influenced by network parameters in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. With short code, the smaller average AoI can be obtained at the cost of more energy consumption. Compared with other schemes, the truncated HARQ-CC achieves the best average AoI and the moderate average energy cost, which is a compromise between the age and energy.
This letter is concerned with a generalized ordered statistic decoding (OSD) algorithm, called locally constrained OSD (LC-OSD). Instead of order-t reprocessing on the most reliable independent bits, the LC-OSD searches for test error patterns using the serial list Viterbi algorithm (SLVA) over a trellis specified by a local parity-check matrix. We derive several early stopping criteria that can be used to reduce the number of searches. Numerical results show that the LC-OSD algorithm with the proposed stopping criteria has much lower time complexity than the original OSD but incurs negligible performance loss.
28 June 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Communications
Age of information (AoI) and energy efficiency (EE), as two important performance metrics in status update systems, usually cannot be simultaneously optimized. This paper investigates the age and energy tradeoff for multicast networks with retransmissions, where each sensed status update is encoded as a short blocklength packet and is broadcasted to multiple destinations via independent and identically distributed error-prone channels. By considering the stopping threshold, the average AoI and EE expressions for stopping at earliest- l , stopping at preselected- l , and wait-for-all schemes are derived as a function of the packet length. On this basis, the average AoI-EE ratio is introduced and is minimized to trade off age and energy by optimizing the packet length. Numerical results indicate that among the three schemes, earliest- l scheme attains the minimum AoI when the packet length is small, and preselected- l scheme attains the maximum EE when the packet length is large. An optimal packet length can always be found for each scheme to minimize age-energy ratio. Moreover, the selection of stopping threshold l will also impact the age and energy performance.
27 August 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Age-of-Information (AoI), or simply age, which measures the data freshness, is essential for real-time Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. On the other hand, energy saving is urgently required by many energy-constrained IoT devices. This paper studies the energy-age tradeoff for status update from a sensor to a monitor over an error-prone channel. The sensor can sleep, sense and transmit a new update, or retransmit by considering both sensing energy and transmit energy. An infinite-horizon average cost problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) with the objective of minimizing the weighted sum of average AoI and average energy consumption. By solving the associated discounted cost problem and analyzing the Markov chain under the optimal policy, we prove that there exists a threshold optimal stationary policy with only two thresholds, i.e., one threshold on the AoI at the transmitter (AoIT) and the other on the AoI at the receiver (AoIR). Moreover, the two thresholds can be efficiently found by a line search. Numerical results show the performance of the optimal policies and the tradeoff curves with different parameters. Comparisons with the conventional policies show that considering sensing energy is of significant impact on the policy design, and introducing sleep mode greatly expands the tradeoff range.
9 March 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
This paper proposes a new class of spatially coupled codes, which are constructed by sending codewords of a low-density parity-check block code (LDPC-BC) in a block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) manner, resulting in the BMST-LDPC codes. Different from the conventional spatially coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) codes, the proposed BMST-LDPC codes can have encoder/decoder implemented using the structure of the corresponding LDPC-BCs. The proposed construction is universal, which is applicable to any existing LDPC-BCs including the 5 G New Radio (5G-NR) LDPC-BCs to obtain extra coding gains. The proposed BMST-LDPC codes are also a special class of BMST codes, which have lower error floors even with an encoding memory of one, inheriting a low decoding latency. Moreover, partial superposition, where a fraction of the coded bits are superimposed onto the following codewords, is introduced to alleviate the decoding error propagation. The construction can be optimized, for random long codes, by a protograph-based extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis, or by a one-dimensional search for structured block codes. Furthermore, the BMST-LDPC scheme is integrated with the hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) over the block fading channel, improving the throughput performance. Numerical results are presented to validate our analysis and demonstrate the performance advantage of the BMST-LDPC codes over the LDPC-BCs. They also show that the proposed HARQ scheme can yield a throughput improvement of up to 10% over the conventional HARQ scheme.