Minimizing the Age of Information in Wireless Networks with Stochastic Arrivals

Igor Kadota*, Eytan Modiano

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

90 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider a wireless network with a base station serving multiple traffic streams to different destinations. Packets from each stream arrive to the base station according to a stochastic process and are enqueued in a separate (per stream) queue. The queueing discipline controls which packet within each queue is available for transmission. The base station decides, at every time t, which stream to serve to the corresponding destination. The goal of scheduling decisions is to keep the information at the destinations fresh. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the AoI performance achievable by any given network operating under any queueing discipline. Then, we consider three common queueing disciplines and develop both an Optimal Stationary Randomized policy and a Max-Weight policy under each discipline. Our approach allows us to evaluate the combined impact of the stochastic arrivals, queueing discipline and scheduling policy on AoI. We evaluate the AoI performance both analytically and using simulations. Numerical results show that the performance of the Max-Weight policy is close to the analytical lower bound.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number8933047
Pages (from-to)1173-1185
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1 2021

Funding

This work was supported by NSF Grants AST-1547331, CNS-1713725, and CNS-1701964, and by Army Research Office (ARO) grant number W911NF-17-1-0508. This paper was presented in part at ACM MobiHoc 2019 [1].

Keywords

  • Age of information
  • optimization
  • scheduling
  • wireless networks

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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