Preprint2026

ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control

Sayam Chakraborty, Aimin Li, Yiğit İnce, Sajjad Baghaee, Elif Uysal

arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI]

Official publicationarXiv

Abstract

Satellite Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables massive status-update services beyond terrestrial coverage, but grant-free uplink access creates a coupled freshness-control problem: increasing repetition and receiver-side diversity improves a device's capture-SIC opportunities, yet the resulting population congestion degrades network-wide freshness. Existing AoI-aware random-access models often rely on slot-synchronous collisions, fixed delivery probabilities, or scalar transmit-or-wait decisions and therefore cannot capture asynchronous satellite uplinks with capture and SIC. This paper develops a PHY-aware mean-field framework, termed ASTRA (Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access), for freshness-driven satellite IoT random access. We build an access model that captures asynchronous arrivals, partial overlaps, capture, and SIC while preserving the dependence of delivery success on each device's repetition-diversity action. We then formulate the population interaction as a scalable mean-field MDP in which devices optimize access timing and intensity using only local AoI observations. The resulting system admits a mean-field equilibrium in which individual optimality and endogenous congestion are mutually consistent. We further prove that the optimal equilibrium policy admits an age-threshold structure. Numerical results show that the proposed policy reduces AoI relative to age-independent baselines.

Selected figures

Figure 1 from “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control”: Asynchronous satellite IoT uplink with capture-SIC. In each frame (Tf, M slots), N devices transmit d replicas over R resource pools
Fig. 1 · Asynchronous satellite IoT uplink with capture-SIC. In each frame (Tf, M slots), N devices transmit d replicas over R resource pools.
Reproduced from: S. Chakraborty et al., “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI], 2026. View the original publication.
Figure 2 from “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control”: Asynchronous packet reception and partial overlaps. Packets assigned to slots arrive with residual offsets δi, leading to continuous-time transmissions of length Tp that may partially overlap. The overlap duration Lij determines the time-averaged interference contribution in SINR calculations
Fig. 2 · Asynchronous packet reception and partial overlaps. Packets assigned to slots arrive with residual offsets δi, leading to continuous-time transmissions of length Tp that may partially overlap. The overlap duration Lij determines the time-averaged interference contribution in SINR calculations.
Reproduced from: S. Chakraborty et al., “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI], 2026. View the original publication.
Figure 4 from “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control”: Average AoI versus mean energy per device for the proposed ASTRA scheme and baseline policies. Noise variance is (a) σ2 = 0.5 and (b) σ2 = 1
Fig. 4 · Average AoI versus mean energy per device for the proposed ASTRA scheme and baseline policies. Noise variance is (a) σ2 = 0.5 and (b) σ2 = 1.
Reproduced from: S. Chakraborty et al., “ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI], 2026. View the original publication.

Cite this work

Plain text

S. Chakraborty, A. Li, Y. İnce, S. Baghaee and E. Uysal, "ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control," arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI], 2026.

BibTeX 
@misc{chakraborty2026astra,
  author        = {Chakraborty, Sayam and Li, Aimin and İnce, Yiğit and Baghaee, Sajjad and Uysal, Elif},
  title         = {ASTRA: Asynchronous Age-Aware Satellite Random Access via Mean-Field Control},
  eprint        = {2605.18282},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.NI},
  howpublished  = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18282 [cs.NI]},
  year          = {2026},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18282}
}

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