Experimental evaluation of the age of information via emulation

This work focuses on evaluating a new metric for the timeliness of information in a status monitoring system, referred to as the age of information or the status age. Investigation into the age of information metric is fairly recent and has primarily been focused on theoretical analysis, and there has been no evaluation of the metric in a realistic system of networked nodes. We evaluate the age metric in a realistic wireless system using the open source network emulation tools CORE and EMANE. Our goal is to validate theoretical results on age for a single link across a wide range of system parameters. In addition to verifying existing theoretical results, we go further by adding more theoretical results that better model the emulated system than currently offered in the theory. Our results indicate that the theoretical results are indicative of real world behavior, but we also identify the limitations of the theoretical models and the impact on the emulated age.