  Consider an energy harvesting node where generation of a status update
message takes non-negligible time due to sensing, computing and analytics
operations performed before making update transmissions. The node has to
harmonize its (re)transmission strategy with the sensing/computing. We call
this general set of problems intermittent status updating. In this paper, we
consider intermittent status updating through non-preemptive sensing/computing
(S/C) and transmission (Tx) operations, each costing a single energy recharge
of the node, through an erasure channel with (a) perfect channel feedback and
(b) no channel feedback. The S/C time for each update is independent with a
general distribution. The Tx queue has a single data buffer to save the latest
packet generated after the S/C operation and a single transmitter where
transmission time is deterministic. Once energy is harvested, the node has to
decide whether to activate S/C to generate a new update or to (re)send the
existing update (if any) to the receiver. We prove that when feedback is
available average peak age of information (AoI) at the receiver is minimized by
a threshold-based policy that allows only young packets to be (re)sent or else
generates a new update. We additionally propose window based and probabilistic
retransmission schemes for both cases (a) and (b) and obtain closed form
average peak AoI expressions. Our numerical results show average peak AoI
performance comparisons and improvements.
