Strategic Backoff of Slotted ALOHA for Minimal Age of Information

Random access protocols are usually adopted in the Internet of Things to enable uncoordinated medium sharing. Tackling this setting, we explore the statistics of the packet inter-delivery times under slotted ALOHA contention, considering two backoff schemes (reactive vs. proactive). We further discuss the efficiency of these schemes in minimizing the average age of information. Finally, we investigate age minimization both as a centralized optimization and via game theory, obtaining numerical solutions for both cases. A reactive scheme applied in a centralized manner is found to be the most suitable to systems that require a bounded age, whereas a proactive solution applied distributedly is best used to minimize the average age.