Age and Energy Tradeoff for Multicast Networks With Short Packet Transmissions

Age of information (AoI) and energy efficiency (EE), as two important performance metrics in status update systems, usually cannot be simultaneously optimized. This paper investigates the age and energy tradeoff for multicast networks with retransmissions, where each sensed status update is encoded as a short blocklength packet and is broadcasted to multiple destinations via independent and identically distributed error-prone channels. By considering the stopping threshold, the average AoI and EE expressions for stopping at earliest- $\ell $ , stopping at preselected- $\ell $ , and wait-for-all schemes are derived as a function of the packet length. On this basis, the average AoI-EE ratio is introduced and is minimized to trade off age and energy by optimizing the packet length. Numerical results indicate that among the three schemes, earliest- $\ell $ scheme attains the minimum AoI when the packet length is small, and preselected- $\ell $ scheme attains the maximum EE when the packet length is large. An optimal packet length can always be found for each scheme to minimize age-energy ratio. Moreover, the selection of stopping threshold $\ell $ will also impact the age and energy performance.