Age-Optimal Updates of Multiple Information Flows

TL;DR

This paper investigates optimal scheduling policies to minimize the age of information across multiple data flows sent through multiple servers, proposing near-optimal solutions under synchronized packet arrivals.

Contribution

It introduces two online scheduling policies that are near-optimal for minimizing age of information in multi-flow, multi-server systems with synchronized packet arrivals.

Findings

Proposed policies are near-optimal for symmetric age penalties.

Policies perform well under synchronized packet generation and arrival.

Effective in minimizing age-related metrics over time.

Abstract

In this paper, we study an age of information minimization problem, where multiple flows of update packets are sent over multiple servers to their destinations. Two online scheduling policies are proposed. When the packet generation and arrival times are synchronized across the flows, the proposed policies are shown to be (near) optimal for minimizing any time-dependent, symmetric, and non-decreasing penalty function of the ages of the flows over time in a stochastic ordering sense.