Fairness for Freshness: Optimal Age of Information Based OFDMA Scheduling with Minimal Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel blind scheduling approach for OFDMA systems that minimizes long-term average Age of Information (AoI) without relying on real-time knowledge, combining fairness and heuristic solutions.

Contribution

It proposes a new blind radio resource scheduling method for OFDMA that optimally minimizes AoI without requiring real-time channel or AoI knowledge.

Findings

Heuristic solutions achieve near-optimal performance in simulations.

The proposed method effectively reduces AoI in absence of real-time information.

Combines time-domain fairness with frequency-domain sub-carrier assignment.

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly clear that an important task for wireless networks is to minimize the age of information (AoI), i.e., the timeliness of information delivery. While mainstream approaches generally rely on the real-time observation of user AoI and channel state, there has been little attention to solve the problem in a complete (or partial) absence of such knowledge. In this article, we present a novel study to address the optimal blind radio resource scheduling problem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems towards minimizing long-term average AoI, which is proven to be the composition of time-domain-fair clustered round-robin and frequency-domain-fair intra-cluster sub-carrier assignment. Heuristic solutions that are near-optimal as shown by simulation results are also proposed to effectively improve the performance upon presence of various degrees of extra knowledge, e.g., channel state and AoI.