  Emerging applications, such as smart factories and fleets of drones,
increasingly rely on sharing time-sensitive information for monitoring and
control. In such application domains, it is essential to keep information
fresh, as outdated information loses its value and can lead to system failures
and safety risks. The Age-of-Information is a performance metric that captures
how fresh the information is from the perspective of the destination.
  In this paper, we show that as the congestion in the wireless network
increases, the Age-of-Information degrades sharply, leading to outdated
information at the destination. Leveraging years of theoretical research, we
propose WiFresh: an unconventional architecture that achieves near optimal
information freshness in wireless networks of any size, even when the network
is overloaded. Our experimental results show that WiFresh can improve
information freshness by two orders of magnitude when compared to an equivalent
standard WiFi network. We propose and realize two strategies for implementing
WiFresh: one at the MAC layer using hardware-level programming and another at
the Application layer using Python.
