Information Freshness in Multi-Hop Satellite IoT Systems

Space-air-ground integration has become paramount in the next generation of wireless communication systems in the era marked by the seamless integration of terrestrial and celestial domains. On the other hand, the age of information (AoI) has recently emerged as a vital metric for evaluating the timeliness and freshness of data in these multi-hop communication systems. This paper focuses on investigating the information freshness of multi-hop satellite IoT systems while considering several automatic repeat request (ARQ) and hybrid ARQ (HARQ) schemes over different hops to promise the reliability of data transmissions. Specifically, a group of remote sensors transmits their data to a terrestrial base station (B) via the code-division multiple access (CDMA) strategy to exploit CDMA's natural merits, e.g., anti-jamming and simultaneous transmissions. Then, B sends these received data to a data destination (D) via a satellite (R) under the transparent forwarding strategy. We derive the closed form of the outage probability for the CDMA protocol considering multi-user interference (MUI) and the closed form of the end-to-end outage probability for the three kinds of ARQ and HARQ schemes on the dual-hop B-R-D transmission, and then finally derive the expression of the corresponding AoI. Finally, numerical results show that simulations match well with the theoretical results, proving the analysis's correctness and the pros and cons of the different ARQ/HARQ schemes.