Modeling the age of information in emulated ad hoc networks

The age of information is a measure of the freshness of continually updated information, which has been studied theoretically for a variety of queueing models. We conduct an experimental evaluation of the age of information in various emulated network settings to see how well the queue models approximate a network for the purpose of age. We use CORE and EMANE to deploy a one-dimensional multi-hop network, and a two-dimensional grid multi-hop network, and we compare to the theoretical age under the D/M/1 and D/D/1 queue models. We observe that for these regular static networks, the D/D/1 models the average age performance better than the D/M/1 in lightly loaded networks with low loss. When losses increase, the age is greater than predicted by the D/D/1 model.