Towards AoI-aware Smart IoT Systems

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, ensuring the timely delivery of information becomes crucial for real-time decision-making in smart systems. This paper introduces the Age of Information (AoI) as a powerful metric for quantifying the freshness of data, especially in systems where outdated information can lead to degraded performance or incorrect decisions.

Unlike traditional metrics such as throughput or latency, AoI captures how old the most recently received data is, making it ideal for status-update-driven applications. The authors present one of the first real-world experimental investigations of AoI, using two testbeds: one based on high-performance PCs connected via the Internet, and another using low-power IoT devices communicating over local wireless networks.

Through extensive experiments with TCP, UDP, and WebSocket protocols, the paper evaluates AoI performance under different conditions, analyzing key factors like synchronization errors, processing limitations, and protocol behavior. Results reveal that common transport protocols are not optimized for minimizing AoI, especially in resource-constrained IoT environments. The study also demonstrates how first-come-first-served (FCFS) policies and device-level constraints significantly impact AoI, and highlights the need for AoI-aware protocol and architecture design in modern IoT systems.

By bridging theoretical insights with practical experimentation, this work provides valuable guidelines for researchers and developers aiming to build smarter, fresher, and more reliable IoT systems.

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