Game of Ages in a Distributed Network

We consider a distributed IoT network, where each node wants to minimize its own age of information and there is a cost to make any transmission. A collision model is considered, where any transmission is successful from a node to a common monitor if no other node transmits in the same slot. Nodes cannot coordinate their transmission, and can learn about the network only via binary collision information. Under this distributed competition model, the objective of this paper is to find a distributed transmission strategy for each node that converges to an equilibrium that only depends on the past observations seen by each node and does not require network information, e.g., the number of other nodes, or their strategies. A simple update strategy is shown to converge to an equilibrium for any number of nodes that are unknown to the update strategy. The equilibrium achieved is in fact a Nash equilibrium for a suitable utility function, that captures all the right tradeoffs for each node.

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