Age of Information in Relay-Aided Wireless Body Area Networks With and Without Retransmission

As a vital metric to characterize information fresh- ness, age of information (AoI) holds a significant importance in networks where timing is critical. This paper explores the information freshness for relay-aided wireless body area net- works (WBAN). By analyzing the status update scheme with and without retransmission, the average AoIs for two schemes are examined and evaluated. Numerical simulations show that the effect of retransmission in relaying WBAN is different from the point-to-point (P2P) one. Specifically, the status update with retransmission achieves the lower average AoI in relaying networks but the higher average AoI in P2P networks.