Age Debt: A General Framework For Minimizing Age of Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general framework for minimizing the age of information in complex wireless networks by converting AoI problems into network stability problems and proposing a low complexity heuristic algorithm.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to transform AoI optimization into stability problems and offers a versatile, low complexity heuristic for various network topologies and constraints.

Findings

Algorithms perform comparably to the best existing schemes.

Applicable to diverse network configurations including unicast, multicast, and broadcast.

Handles interference, link reliability, and different AoI cost functions.

Abstract

We consider the problem of minimizing age of information in general single-hop and multihop wireless networks. First, we formulate a way to convert AoI optimization problems into equivalent network stability problems. Then, we propose a heuristic low complexity approach for achieving stability that can handle general network topologies; unicast, multicast and broadcast flows; interference constraints; link reliabilities; and AoI cost functions. We provide numerical results to show that our proposed algorithms behave as well as the best known scheduling and routing schemes available in the literature for a wide variety of network settings.