LUPMAC: A cross-layer MAC technique to improve the age of information over dense WLANs

Age of Information (AoI) is a relatively new metric introduced to capture the freshness of a particular piece of information. While throughput and delay measurements are widely studied in the context of dense IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) little is known in the literature about the AoI in this context. In this work we study the effects on the average AoI and its variance when a sensor node is immersed in a dense IEEE 802.11 WLAN. We also introduce a new cross layer MAC technique called Latest UPdate MAC (LUPMAC) aimed at modifying the existing IEEE 802.11 in order to minimize the average AoI at the receiver end. This technique lets the MAC layer keep only the most up to date packets of a particular piece of information in the buffer. We show, through simulation, that this technique achieves significant advantages in the case of a congested dense IEEE 802.11 WLAN, and it is resilient to changes in the variance of the total network delay.