Correlation of Multiple Strategic Sources Decreases Their Age of Information Anarchy

Abstract

We consider a sensor network, where multiple sources send status updates to a common receiver and, due to correlation in the content, transmissions from a given node can also be informative for others. The objective is to minimize the individual information freshness, quantified through age of information, at the receiver's side. We compare a centralized control with a disitributed minimization; in the former, the globally optimal data injection rate is chosen, whereas in the latter, sources behave like players of a non-cooperative game of complete information. We compute Nash equilibrium and quantify the price of anarchy. Even a moderate correlation among sources is shown to make a distributed approach more efficient. For a correlation of 1/3 of the content, the anarchy is set to just 6-7% worse than the optimum.