Information aging has gained prominence in characterizing communication protocols for timely remote estimation and control applications. This work proposes an Age of Information (AoI)-aware threshold-based dynamic frame slotted ALOHA (T-DFSA) for contention resolution in random access machine-type communication networks. Unlike conventional DFSA that maximizes the throughput in each frame, the frame length and age-gain threshold in T-DFSA are determined to minimize the normalized average AoI reduction of the network in each frame. At the start of each frame in the proposed protocol, the common Access Point (AP) stores an estimate of the age-gain distribution of a typical node. Depending on the observed status of the slots, age-gains of successful nodes, and maximum available AoI, the AP adjusts its estimation in each frame. The maximum available AoI is exploited to derive the maximum possible age-gain at each frame and thus, to avoid overestimating the age-gain threshold, which may render T-DFSA unstable. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed T-DFSA compared to the existing optimal frame slotted ALOHA, threshold-ALOHA, and age-based thinning protocols in a considerable range of update generation rates.

翻译：信息老化在描述面向远程估计与控制的实时通信协议中日益凸显其重要性。本文提出一种基于信息年龄（AoI）感知阈值的动态帧时隙ALOHA（T-DFSA）协议，用于解决随机接入机器类通信网络中的信道竞争问题。与每帧最大化吞吐量的传统DFSA不同，T-DFSA通过优化帧长与年龄增益阈值，最小化网络每帧的归一化平均AoI降幅。在所提协议的每帧起始阶段，公共接入点（AP）存储典型节点的年龄增益分布估计值。AP根据观测到的时隙状态、成功节点的年龄增益以及最大可用AoI，在每帧中动态调整其估计值。通过利用最大可用AoI推导每帧可能获得的最大年龄增益，避免对年龄增益阈值的过高估计（该估计可能导致T-DFSA协议不稳定）。数值结果验证了理论分析的正确性，并表明在较宽泛的更新生成速率范围内，所提T-DFSA相较于现有最优帧时隙ALOHA、阈值ALOHA及基于年龄的稀疏协议具有更优性能。