Age of Information and Energy Consumption in IoT: an Experimental Evaluation

TL;DR

The paper addresses the AoI–energy trade-off in battery-powered IoT under MQTT over cellular networks by constructing an experimental testbed that measures AoI at a subscriber and publisher energy. It employs a QUIC/TLS transport stack, varying generation rate, delay, payload, cores, and transport protocol, and analyzes results with exact AoI computation and Pareto-front visualizations. The main findings show no universal optimum; AoI and energy scale with transmission rate and buffering behavior, with QUIC generally offering lower AoI at the cost of higher energy, while TLS with Nagle disabled can match QUIC in AoI under certain conditions. This work provides actionable insights for protocol design and system tuning in IoT to balance freshness and energy, highlighting the importance of transport-layer aggregation and protocol maturity for practical deployments.

Abstract

The Age of Information (AoI) is an end-to-end metric frequently used to understand how "fresh" the information about a remote system is. In this paper, we present an experimental study of the relationship between AoI and the energy spent by the device that produces information, e.g. an IoT device or a monitoring sensor. Such a relationship has been almost neglected so far, but it is particularly important whenever the sensing side is battery-operated. The study is carried out in a scenario where access is achieved via the cellular network and information is transferred using MQTT, a popular messaging protocol in the IoT domain. Numerous parameters of operation are considered, and the most efficient solutions in all configurations are provided.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Experimental setup hardware and software architecture.
• Figure 2: Median definition for aoi function
• Figure 3: Projection algorithm.
• Figure 4: Example of Pareto Front.
• Figure 5: Generation rate results.