Optimizing Age of Information in Polar-Coded Status Update System

Age of information (AoI) defines the freshness of status update in real-time systems, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and can be affected by delays and transmission error probability. To improve the reliability of data transmissions, the recent AoI works on physical layer considered applying practical coding schemes. Since polar codes can be strictly proved to achieve the channel capacity, this article makes an effort to comprehensively investigate and optimize the AoI performance in a polar-coded status update system. First, we propose a practical code-based status update system that takes full consideration of encoding, transmission, propagation, decoding, and feedback delays in AoI analysis. Then, we analyze and derive the average AoI of the proposed system with various transmission protocols. The simulation results of a polar-coded system validate the theoretical analysis and show that hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) achieves better AoI performance than non-HARQ. To optimize AoI in polar-coded status update system, we further improve the designs for HARQ with chase combining (HARQ-CC) and HARQ with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR), respectively. The design signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), puncturing length of HARQ-CC are optimized by traversal, while the code lengths for each transmission and maximum transmission times of HARQ-IR are optimized by the greedy algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed HARQ can achieve better average AoI performance than traditional HARQ.