Age of Information of a Power Constrained Scheduler in the Presence of a Power Constrained Adversary

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the age of information in a power-constrained communication network with an adversary, establishing bounds, optimal policies, and conditions for Nash equilibrium existence.

Contribution

It introduces universal lower bounds, evaluates the optimality of scheduling policies, and explores Nash equilibrium conditions in a power-constrained adversarial setting.

Findings

Uniform scheduling with any feasible power policy is 4-optimal.

Max-age user policy is 2-optimal.

Nash equilibrium existence depends on specific network conditions.

Abstract

We consider a time slotted communication network consisting of a base station (BS), an adversary, $N$ users and $N_s$ communication channels. Both the BS and the adversary have average power constraints and the probability of successful transmission of an update packet depends on the transmission power of the BS and the blocking power of the adversary. We provide a universal lower bound for the average age for this communication network. We prove that the uniform scheduling algorithm with any feasible transmission power choosing policy is $4$ optimal; and the max-age user choosing policy is $2$ optimal. In the second part of the paper, we consider the setting where the BS chooses a transmission policy and the adversary chooses a blocking policy from the set of randomized stationary policies. We show that the Nash equilibrium point may or may not exist for this communication network. We find special cases where the Nash equilibrium always exists.