Unveiling the Importance of NOMA for Reducing AoI

The aim of this paper is to exploit cognitive-ratio inspired non-orthogonal multiple access (CR-NOMA) transmission to reduce the age of information (AoI) in wireless networks, where the key features of different data generation models are effectively utilized. Analytical results for the AoI achieved by CR-NOMA are developed to demonstrate two benefits of using NOMA to reduce the AoI in wireless networks. One is that the use of NOMA provides users more opportunities to transmit, which means that the users can update their base station more frequently. The other is that the use of NOMA can reduce access delay, i.e., the users are scheduled to transmit earlier than in the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) case, which is useful to improve the freshness of the data available in the wireless network.