Whittle Index Based Scheduling Policy for Minimizing the Cost of Age of Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Whittle index-based scheduling policy to efficiently minimize age of information costs in multiuser systems with unreliable channels, outperforming existing policies.

Contribution

It derives a closed-form Whittle index for AoI minimization and proposes a new scheduling policy that improves performance over existing methods.

Findings

The proposed policy outperforms existing policies in simulations.

The Whittle index is derived in closed form for the AoI problem.

Numerical results demonstrate significant performance gains.

Abstract

We design a new scheduling policy to minimize the general non-decreasing cost function of age of information (AoI) in a multiuser system. In this system, the base station stochastically generates time-sensitive packets and transmits them to corresponding user equipments via an unreliable channel. We first formulate the transmission scheduling problem as an average cost constrained Markov decision process problem. Through introducing the service charge, we derive the closed-form expression for the Whittle index, based on which we design the scheduling policy. Using numerical results, we demonstrate the performance gain of our designed scheduling policy compared to the existing policies, such as the optimal policy, the on-demand Whittle index policy, and the age greedy policy.