Harmony or Involution: Game Inspiring Age-of-Information Optimization for Edge Data Gathering in Internet of Things

Age-of-Information (AoI) has been recently reckoned as a suitable parameter to evaluate the freshness of collected information, which is essential for data retrieval in Internet of Things, especially the monitoring tasks, e.g., the operating situation of equipments. To motivate a large number of sensor nodes and solicit more up-to-date information from these nodes, the control center usually allocates rewards to nodes according to their proportional contributions. This induces intense competitions among nodes who try to gain high payoffs by carefully balancing the rewards and the costs. In this article, we propose a novel stochastic game model to formulate the competition among sensor nodes, which considers AoI as a metric used by the control center to quantify the contributions of nodes. We also take into account the uncertainty of channel quality, which affects the transmission success ratio of packets generated by nodes. Finally, we design an ϵ-Nash learning algorithm, which adopts the θ-greedy exploration strategy, to derive the ϵ-approximate Nash equilibrium such that nodes can maximize their long-term payoffs. Our substantive simulation results and analysis verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline algorithms in bringing higher payoffs to nodes and more fresh information to the control center.