Packet Management of AoI in the Finite Block-Length Regime

Mission-critical applications, such as real-time monitoring and tracking, are of significant importance to six generation (6G)’s massive and ubiquitous Internet of things (IoT). To this end, finite blocklength (FBL)-based wireless communication is a promising solution. In addition to that, to assess the freshness of information, age of information (AoI) has been widely adopted. In AoI optimization, packet management is an effective way. However, the impact of packet errors is inevitable in the FBL regime, which is mostly omitted in prior studies. Motivated by exploring the joint impact of the above factors, we consider a system equipped with a single buffer, and propose two schemes of packet management in this article. We subsequently derive the closed-form expressions for the average AoI and the average peak AoI for the two schemes. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed scheme.