Information Freshness and Timeliness Analysis in the Finite Blocklength Regime for Mission-Critical Applications

Mission-critical applications are of significant importance to sixth generation (6G)’s massive and ubiquitous Internet of things (IoT) communications. The mission-critical applications mostly fall within the scope of finite blocklength (FBL), and in order to assess the information freshness, age of information (AoI) has been introduced. However, packet error is inevitable in the FBL regime, which exerts impacts on the time for successful packet transmission, and thus increases the AoI. To optimize the performance of AoI, the management of queue packets is an effective way. Motivated by optimizing the AoI performance in the FBL regime, 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 and we discuss the relationship between AoI and the factors, i.e. the blocklength, data generation rate and signal-to-noise ratio. Afterwards, we give the optimal blocklength expression associated with the optimal AoI. In order to examine the information timeliness in the network under the proposed schemes, the closed-form expressions of the average delay are deduced. The simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed scheme in terms of the performance of AoI, delay, and their trade-off.