Age-of-information with information source diversity in an energy harvesting system

Age of information (AoI) is a key performance metric for the Internet of things (IoT). Timely status updates are essential for many IoT applications; however, they often suffer from harsh energy constraints and the unreliability of underlying information sources. To overcome these unpredictabilities, one can employ multiple sources that track the same process of interest, but with different energy costs and reliabilities. We consider an energy-harvesting (EH) monitoring node equipped with a finite-size battery and collecting status updates from multiple heterogeneous information sources. We investigate the policies that minimize the average AoI, formulating a Markov decision process (MDP) to choose the optimal actions of either updating from one of the sources or remaining idle, based on the current energy level and the AoI at the monitoring node. We analyze the structure of the optimal solution for different cost/AoI distribution combinations, and compare its performance with an aggressive policy that transmits whenever possible.