Impact of Block Coding on Age of Information in Centralized IoT: Insights From BEC and BSC

This work explores the age of information (AoI) impact of block coding with maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD), along with the consideration of polar coding with successive-cancellation (SC) decoding as a realizable subcase by employing an Internet of things (IoT) network, where sensors transmit data over discrete memoryless binary symmetric or erasure channels. A general lower bound for block coding is derived along with the upper bounds depending on the coding schemes. Simulation results indicate that block coding can theoretically outperform no coding up to 20-25\% in terms of AoI depending on the block-length of the code. Suitable conditions in polar coding to converge to theoretical MLD performance are discussed.