Massive Opportunistic Sensing with Limited Collaboration for Age of Information

We consider an Internet of thing scenario, where a set of sensors collect data and exchange them with a common receiver. We analyze their interaction, considering a shared goal to minimize Age of information at the receiver's side. We argue that a fully collaborative setup, albeit generally succeeding in this task at first, often leads to resource wastage in the long run. We try to achieve a similar level of cooperation through a purely opportunistic mechanism, in which nodes are driven by selfish objectives, but still aware of the ultimate goal of maximizing information freshness. We show how our proposed approach, allowing fewer nodes to participate in the task (up to one order of magnitude), results in a better resource management, still improving the long-term average age of information. At the same time, a target number of participating nodes can be set, e.g., to a given fraction of the network, by properly tuning the individual objectives and the communication costs.