Age of Information of CSMA/CA Based Wireless Networks

Abstract: We consider a wireless network where N nodes compete for a shared channel over the CSMA/CA protocol to deliver observed updates to a common remote monitor. For this network, we rate the information freshness of the CSMA/CA based network using the age of information (AoI). Different from previous work, the network we consider is unsaturated. To theoretically analyze the transmission behavior of the CSMA/CA based network, we, therefore, develop an equivalent and tractable Markov transmission model. Based on this newly developed model, the transmission probability, collision probability and average AoI of the network are obtained. Our numerical results show that as the packet rate and the number of nodes increase, both the transmission probability and collision probability are increasing; the average AoI first decreases and then increases as the packet rate increases and increases with the number of nodes.