Achieving Optimal Age of Information in Discontinuous Reception Devices

Abstract

The variety of low latency applications in 6G makes the issue of maintaining data freshness increasingly important. However, due to battery life limitations, User Equipment (UE) should also apply power-saving procedures, such as Discontinuous Reception (DRX), which may result in additional latency. Therefore, this paper aims to study the relationship between data freshness and power-saving performance. To capture the information freshness, we use Age of Information (AoI) as the performance metric. To the best of our knowledge, unlike previous studies that primarily focus on the trade-off between power saving and delay, this is the first study to consider the impact of DRX on the Age of Information (AoI). We have derived the closed-form solutions for both the peak-average AoI (PAoI) and time-average AoI (TAoI) under the DRX mechanism, along with their respective parameter adjustment strategies. Based on our simulation validation, these proposed strategies enable the UE to maintain the average AoI close to the theoretical lower bound while simultaneously achieving high power-saving efficiency. This positions our approach at the forefront of balancing information freshness and energy conservation in mobile and IoT networks.