Data Freshness and End-to-End Delay in Cross-Layer Two-Tier Linear IoT Networks

The operational and technological structures of radio access networks have undergone tremendous changes in recent years. A displacement of priority from capacity–coverage optimization (to ensure data freshness) has emerged. Multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) is a solution that addresses the exponential growth of traffic demands, providing degrees of freedom in meeting various performance goals, including energy efficiencies in IoT networks. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the possibility of leveraging multi-RAT to reduce each user’s transmission delay while preserving the requisite quality of service (QoS) and maintaining the freshness of the received information via the age of information (AoI) metric. First, we investigated the coordination between a multi-hop network and a cellular network. Each IoT device served as an information source that generated packets (transmitting them toward the base station) and a relay (for packets generated upstream). We created a queuing system that included the network and MAC layers. We propose a framework comprised of various models and tools for forecasting network performances in terms of the end-to-end delay of ongoing flows and AoI. Finally, to highlight the benefits of our framework, we performed comprehensive simulations. In discussing these numerical results, insights regarding various aspects and metrics (parameter tuning, expected QoS, and performance) are made apparent.