More Like this

1. The Age of Gossip in Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISIT45174.2021.9517796  

   Yates, Roy D. (July 2021, 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT))

   A source node updates its status as a point process and also forwards its updates to a network of observer nodes. Within the network of observers, these updates are forwarded as point processes from node to node. Each node wishes its knowledge of the source to be as timely as possible. In this network, timeliness is measured by a discrete form of age of information: each status change at the source is referred to as a version and the age at a node is how many versions out of date is its most recent update from the source. This work introduces a method for evaluating the average version age at each node in the network when nodes forward updates using a memoryless gossip protocol. This method is then demonstrated by version age analysis for a collection of simple networks. For gossip on a complete graph with symmetric updating rates, it is shown that each node has average age that grows as the logarithm of the network size. 

   more » « less
2. Multicast with Prioritized Delivery: How Fresh is Your Data?

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPAWC.2018.8446018  

   Zhong, Jing; Yates, Roy D.; Soljanin, Emina (June 2018, Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), IEEE Workshop on)

   We consider a multicast network in which real-time status updates generated by a source are replicated and sent to multiple interested receiving nodes through independent links. The receiving nodes are divided into two groups: one priority group consists of k nodes that require the reception of every update packet, the other non-priority group consists of all other nodes without the delivery requirement. Using age of information as a freshness metric, we analyze the time-averaged age at both priority and non-priority nodes. For shifted-exponential link delay distributions, the average age at a priority node is lower than that at a non-priority node due to the delivery guarantee. However, this advantage for priority nodes disappears if the link delay is exponential distributed. Both groups of nodes have the same time-averaged age, which implies that the guaranteed delivery of updates has no effect the time-averaged freshness. 

   more » « less
3. Fundamental Bounds on the Age of Information in Multi-Hop Global Status Update Networks

   Farazi, Shahab; Klein, Andrew G.; Brown, D. Richard (January 2019, Age of Information Workshop (INFOCOM 2019))

   This paper studies the “age of information” in a general multi-source multi-hop wireless network with explicit channel contention. Specifically, the scenario considered in this paper assumes that each node in the network is both a source and a monitor of information, that all nodes wish to receive fresh status updates from all other nodes in the network, and that only one node can transmit in each time slot. Lower bounds for peak and average age of information are derived and expressed in terms of fundamental graph properties including the connected domination number. An algorithm to generate near-optimal periodic status update schedules based on sequential optimal flooding is also developed. These schedules are analytically shown to exactly achieve the peak age bound and also achieve the average age bound within an additive gap scaling linearly with the size of the network. Moreover, the results are sufficiently general to apply to any connected network topology. Illustrative numerical examples are presented which serve to verify the analysis for several canonical network topologies of arbitrary size, as well as every connected network with nine or fewer nodes. 

   more » « less
4. The Age of Information in Networks: Moments, Distributions, and Sampling

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2020.2998100  

   Yates, Roy D. (May 2020, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory)

   A source provides status updates to monitors through a network with state defined by a continuous-time finite Markov chain. An age of information (AoI) metric is used to characterize timeliness by the vector of ages tracked by the monitors. Based on a stochastic hybrid systems (SHS) approach, first order linear differential equations are derived for the temporal evolution of both the moments and the moment generating function (MGF) of the age vector components. It is shown that the existence of a non-negative fixed point for the first moment is sufficient to guarantee convergence of all higher order moments as well as a region of convergence for the stationary MGF vector of the age. The stationary MGF vector is then found for the age on a line network of preemptive memoryless servers. From this MGF, it is found that the age at a node is identical in distribution to the sum of independent exponential service times. This observation is then generalized to linear status sampling networks in which each node receives samples of the update process at each preceding node according to a renewal point process. For each node in the line, the age is shown to be identical in distribution to a sum of independent renewal process age random variables. 

   more » « less
5. Decentralized Online Influence Maximization

   https://doi.org/10.1109/Allerton49937.2022.9929315  

   Bayiz, Yigit E.; Topcu, Ufuk (September 2022, 58th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton))

   We consider the problem of finding the maximally influential node in random networks where each node influences every other node with constant yet unknown probability. We develop an online algorithm that learns the relative influences of the nodes. It relaxes the assumption in the existing literature that a central observer can monitor the influence spread globally. The proposed algorithm delegates the online updates to the nodes on the network; hence requires only local observations at the nodes. We show that using an explore-then-commit learning strategy, the cumulative regret accumulated by the algorithm over horizon T approaches O(T2/3) for a network with a large number of nodes. Additionally, we show that, for fixed T, the worst case-regret grows linearly with the number n of nodes in the graph. Numerical experiments illustrate this linear dependence for Chung-Lu models. The experiments also demonstrate that ε-greedy learning strategies can achieve similar performance to the explore-then-commit strategy on Chung-Lu models. 

   more » « less