Timeliness optimization of unmanned aerial vehicle lossy communications for internet-of-things

Information freshness is a key factor for Internet-of-Things (IoT) to make appropriate decisions and operations. This paper proposes an analytical framework for evaluating the timeliness performance of the IoT system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) lossy communications. The performance analysis consists of the outage probability analysis and the Age-of-Information (AoI) analysis with outages. To begin with, we solve a lossy coding problem formulated from the UAV communication system, and derive a closed-form expression of the outage probability based on Shannon's lossy source-channel separation theorem. Then, we characterize the Peak AoI (PAoI) for the considered system, and further minimize the PAoI by deriving the optimal rate for generating information. Moreover, we analyze the system performance through theoretical calculations and simulations. The results indicate that the optimal server utilization ratio is always no larger than 0.5. In practical applications, we can utilize the proposed analytical framework to determine the system parameters which guarantee the timeliness performance of UAV lossy communications.