A Theory of Second-Order Wireless Network Optimization and Its Application on AoI

TL;DR

This paper develops a second-order theoretical framework for wireless network optimization that considers mean and variance of processes, effectively modeling fading channels and optimizing age-of-information (AoI).

Contribution

It introduces a novel second-order framework for wireless networks, characterizes the capacity region, and proposes a scheduling policy that optimizes AoI over Gilbert-Elliott channels.

Findings

Accurately characterizes the second-order capacity region.

Proposes a scheduling policy that achieves interior points of the capacity region.

Outperforms existing methods in AoI optimization.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework for optimizing second-order behaviors of wireless networks. Unlike existing techniques for network utility maximization, which only considers first-order statistics, this framework models every random process by its mean and temporal variance. The inclusion of temporal variance makes this framework well-suited for modeling stateful fading wireless channels and emerging network performance metrics such as age-of-information (AoI). Using this framework, we sharply characterize the second-order capacity region of wireless access networks. We also propose a simple scheduling policy and prove that it can achieve every interior point in the second-order capacity region. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, we apply it for an important open problem: the optimization of AoI over Gilbert-Elliott channels. We show that this framework provides a very accurate characterization of AoI. Moreover, it leads to a tractable scheduling policy that outperforms other existing work.