WiFresh: Age-of-Information from Theory to Implementation

Emerging applications, such as autonomous vehicles and smart factories, increasingly rely on sharing time-sensitive information for monitoring and control. In such application domains, it is essential to keep information fresh, as outdated information loses its value and can lead to system failures and safety risks. The Age-of-Information is a recently proposed performance metric that captures the freshness of the information from the perspective of the destination.

In this talk, we discuss Age-of-Information in practical wireless networks and show that as the number of nodes in a communication network grows, the Age-of-Information degrades sharply, leading to stale information at the destination. Leveraging years of theoretical research, we propose, deploy, and validate WiFresh: a simple yet unconventional architecture for single-hop wireless networks that achieve near-optimal information freshness.