Focusing on information context for ITS using a spatial age of information model

New technologies for sensing and communication act as enablers for cooperative driving applications. Sensors are able to detect objects in the surrounding environment and information such as their current location is exchanged among vehicles. In order to cope with the vehicles' mobility, such information is required to be as fresh as possible for proper operation of cooperative driving applications. The age of information (AoI) has been proposed as a metric for evaluating freshness of information; recently also within the context of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). We investigate mechanisms to reduce the AoI of data transported in form of beacon messages while controlling their emission rate. We aim to balance packet collision probability and beacon frequency using the average peak age of information (PAoI) as a metric. This metric, however, only accounts for the generation time of the data but not for application-specific aspects, such as the location of the transmitting vehicle. We thus propose a new way of interpreting the AoI by considering information context, thereby incorporating vehicles' locations. As an example, we characterize such importance using the orientation and the distance of the involved vehicles. In particular, we introduce a weighting coefficient used in combination with the PAoI to evaluate the information freshness, thus emphasizing on information from more important neighbors. We further design the beaconing approach in a way to meet a given AoI requirement, thus, saving resources on the wireless channel while keeping the AoI minimal. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in Manhattan-like urban scenarios, reaching pre-specified targets for the AoI of beacon messages.