Version-Aware Communication in Multi-Hop IoT Networks with Feedback

Abstract

Timely communication of information in Internet of Things (IoT) networks is critical to enhancing system performance and energy efficiency by minimizing the transmission of outdated or redundant data. Although timeliness metrics such as the Age of Information (AoI) effectively quantify information freshness, they do not account for content evolution. The Version Age of Information (VAoI) addresses this gap by tracking version lag at the receiver, thereby providing a practical content-aware metric. However, prior research has primarily focused on first-moment analyses in single-hop settings, leaving the distributional properties of VAoI in multi-hop networks, as well as the impact of feedback mechanisms, unexplored. In this study, we provide a comprehensive characterization of VAoI in multi-hop networks with transmission constraints and acknowledgment-based feedback. A bi-level optimization framework is formulated to jointly optimize the update policy of a rate-constrained source and the feedback-aware forwarding policies of the intermediate nodes, aiming to minimize communication overhead while maintaining VAoI performance at the destination. We show that the optimal source policy follows a threshold-based update strategy and derive the optimal threshold in closed form. For both the optimal threshold policy and a randomized baseline, we obtain closed-form expressions for the stationary distribution and average VAoI, along with the corresponding update rates across network nodes under feedback-aware forwarding. Numerical results corroborate the analytical findings and illustrate the advantages of utilizing VAoI and feedback to reduce redundant transmissions while preserving data freshness and informativeness in multi-hop systems.