Multiuser Scheduling for Minimizing Age of Information in Uplink MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates optimal user scheduling in uplink MIMO systems to minimize age of information, leveraging multiple antennas for simultaneous transmissions, and develops policies that outperform existing benchmarks.

Contribution

It formulates the multiuser scheduling as an MDP and derives both optimal and low-complexity sub-optimal policies for AoI minimization.

Findings

Optimal policy significantly reduces AoI compared to benchmarks.

Sub-optimal policy achieves near-optimal performance with lower complexity.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of proposed policies.

Abstract

This paper studies the user scheduling problem in a multiuser multiple-input multi-output (MIMO) status update system, in which multiple single-antenna devices aim to send their latest statuses to a multiple-antenna information-fusion access point (AP) via a shared wireless channel. The information freshness in the considered system is quantified by a recently proposed metric, termed age of information (AoI). Thanks to the extra spatial degrees-of-freedom brought about by the multiple antennas at the AP, multiple devices can be granted to transmit simultaneously in each time slot. We aim to seek the optimal scheduling policy that can minimize the network-wide AoI by optimally deciding which device or group of devices to be scheduled for transmission in each slot given the instantaneous AoI values of all devices at the beginning of the slot. To that end, we formulate the multiuser scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). We attain the optimal policy by resolving the formulated MDP problem and develop a low-complexity sub-optimal policy. Simulation results show that the proposed optimal and sub-optimal policies significantly outperform the state-of-the-art benchmark schemes.