Single Threshold Packet Scheduling Policy for AoI Minimization in Resource-Constrained Network

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple, implementable threshold-based packet scheduling policy to minimize average age of information in resource-constrained networks, balancing transmission costs and stochastic packet arrivals.

Contribution

It introduces a low-complexity, threshold-based policy for AoI minimization modeled as a constrained Markov decision process, with closed-form analysis and near-optimal performance.

Findings

Closed-form expressions for AoI distribution and transmission cost.

Policy reduces to optimal under special cases.

Achieves near-optimal performance in general settings.

Abstract

This paper investigates the tradeoff between the average age of information (AoI) and the transmission cost for networks with stochastic packet arrival and random erasure channel. Specifically, we model the resource-constrained AoI minimization problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) and propose a low-complexity single threshold packet scheduling policy for it. The key advantage of the proposed policy is its tractability and convenience for implementation. The AoI distribution and long-term average transmission cost of the proposed policy are derived as closed-form functions of the selected threshold. Furthermore, we show that the proposed policy reduces to the optimal policies under special settings and achieves close-to-optimal performance under general settings.