Novel packet management strategy for minimizing AoI in vehicle-to-everything communications

Abstract

Real-time information freshness is critical for ensuring timely status updates in applications such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications and autonomous driving. The age of information (AoI) metric is valuable for evaluating the freshness of delivered packets. However, maintaining low AoI is challenging due to limited bandwidth, computational delays, and stringent freshness requirements. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel packet management strategy, called age-priority last-generated first-served (AP-LGFS) for a multi-road user system operating over a cellular network. AP-LGFS dynamically prioritizes newly arrived packets and selectively preempts ongoing transmissions when incoming packets exhibit a lower expected AoI, ensuring the timely delivery of critical updates. Then, the proposed AP-LGFS is combined with queuing model to analyze both AoI and peak AoI (PAoI) in road user-to-vehicle communication links. Additionally, it investigates the impact of road user packet arrival rates on information freshness. We use a stochastic process to compare our strategy with other scheduling strategies within the solution space. Comparative simulations demonstrate that AP-LGFS outperforms other scheduling strategies in minimizing AoI and PAoI, thereby enhancing information freshness, and supporting reliable V2X communication systems.