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Age of Information in Cyber-Physical Systems with Cellular IoT Connectivity

Abstract:

A Cyber Physical System (CPS) is a large-scale system, interconnected and integrated by the cyber world through computation, a communication network, and components that interact with the physical environment (sensors and actuators). Wireless networks based on 5G technology are promising to provide connectivity to a CPS. Within the realm of 5G wireless networks in real-time applications, age of information (AoI) has evolved as an intriguing metric that quantifies how often a system’s state information is updated within the underlying applications. We consider a set of sensors with limited battery life to monitor stochastic processes in a smart factory, sharing the wireless access channel to transmit samples to a controller for further processing. The controller sends control commands to the corresponding actuator to control the underlying process. We design the 5G wireless communication channel with the objective of reducing the obsolescence of real-time updates of a CPS by minimizing the AoI to maintain the system’s stability, as well as to disseminate the potential utilities of this technology to the industry. To this end, we study and model the random access channel of a CPS based on 5G wireless technology that controls technological processes. Then, we model the AoI metric in the random access channel as an indicator of the performance of the CPS. An extensive simulation study was conducted, considering machine-type communications and human-to-human traffic with varying access request intensities. We determined the maximum state information update frequency to provide a highly successful access probability over the radio access network.