Age of Information Analysis for Instantly Decompressible IoT Protocols

Generalized deduplication (GD) has been proposed as a new approach for reducing the cost of storage. Recent work has adapted this technique to provide distributed, multisource lossless compression to reduce the total number of bits transmitted in sensor networks. In this paper, we characterize its performance and advantages from an age of information perspective. For simplicity, we analyze the case of one source node receiving one symbol/sample per unit time and transmitting bits to the sink node. We show the potential for GD to also deliver instant decoding of the data to further reduce the average age of information. Using real-world data sets, our solution reduces the information age by 25% and 36% when considering the standard and the instantly decodable versions, respectively compared to the use of the DEFLATE algorithm for compression.