Implementation of an Age Prioritized Wi-Fi Network with Multi-Armed Bandit Polling

Balci A., Saatci B., Atak E., UYSAL E.

2025 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications, ICNC 2025, Hawaii, United States Of America, 17 - 20 February 2025, pp.770-774, (Full Text) identifier

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • Doi Number: 10.1109/icnc64010.2025.10993516
  • City: Hawaii
  • Country: United States Of America
  • Page Numbers: pp.770-774
  • Keywords: Age of Information, IEEE802.11, Information Freshness, Multi-Armed Bandit, Semantic Communication, Wi-Fi
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This paper presents a method for prioritizing transmissions considering the Age of Information (AoI) metric in communication systems that are compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. The proposed method includes Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) at users and a multiuser scheduling algorithm that uses a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) model at the access point. The system was implemented on ESP32 microcontrollers and Raspberry Pi devices to evaluate performance, making our study one of the few real-life implementations of age-aware WiFi. The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the WiFresh method, which uses a Maximum Weight matching scheduler. The simulation and implementation results indicate that the proposed method improves the Peak and mean AoI in the system compared to Wi-Fi. The implementation demonstrates the applicability of the method in real-world scenarios.