Minimizing the Age of Information Over an Erasure Channel for Random Packet Arrivals With a Storage Option at the Transmitter

TL;DR

This paper studies how to optimally manage update transmissions and storage at a base station to minimize information age over an erasure channel, considering storage costs and packet arrivals.

Contribution

It formulates a Markov decision process to derive an optimal storage and transmission policy balancing age and storage costs.

Findings

Derived an optimal switching storage policy.

Characterized the trade-off between age and storage cost.

Provided insights into system performance under optimal policy.

Abstract

We consider a time slotted communication system consisting of a base station (BS) and a user. At each time slot an update packet arrives at the BS with probability $p$, and the BS successfully transmits the update packet with probability $q$ over an erasure channel. We assume that the BS has a unit size buffer where it can store an update packet upon paying a storage cost $c$. There is a trade-off between the age of information and the storage cost. We formulate this trade-off as a Markov decision process and find an optimal switching type storage policy.