Optimal Scheduling Policy for Minimizing Age of Information with a Relay

We consider IoT sensor network where multiple sensors are connected to corresponding destination nodes via a relay. Thus, the relay schedules sensors to sample and destination nodes to update. The relay can select multiple sensors and destination nodes in each time. In order to minimize average weighted sum AoI, joint optimization of sampling and updating policy of the relay is investigated. For errorless and symmetric case where weights are equally given, necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality is found. Using this result, we obtain that the minimum average sum AoI in a closed-form expression which can be interpreted as fundamental limit of sum AoI in a single relay network. Also, for error-prone and symmetric case, we have proved that greedy policy achieves the minimum average sum AoI at the destination nodes. For general case, we have proposed scheduling policy obtained via reinforcement learning.Comment: 30 page

Timely Monitoring of Dynamic Sources with Observations from Multiple Wireless Sensors

Age of Information (AoI) has recently received much attention due to its relevance in IoT sensing and monitoring applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the AoI in a system in which a set of sources are observed by multiple sensors in a many-to-many relationship, and the probability that a sensor observes a source depends on the state of the source. This model represents many practical scenarios, such as the ones in which multiple cameras or microphones are deployed to monitor objects moving in certain areas. We formulate the scheduling problem as a Markov Decision Process, and show how the age-optimal scheduling policy can be obtained. We further consider partially observable variants of the problem, and devise approximate policies for large state spaces. Our evaluations show that the approximate policies work well in the considered scenarios, and that the fact that sensors can observe multiple sources is beneficial, especially when there is high uncertainty of the source states.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing Age-of-Information in RF-powered Communication Systems

In this paper, we study a real-time monitoring system in which multiple source nodes are responsible for sending update packets to a common destination node in order to maintain the freshness of information at the destination. Since it may not always be feasible to replace or recharge batteries in all source nodes, we consider that the nodes are powered through wireless energy transfer (WET) by the destination. For this system setup, we investigate the optimal online sampling policy (referred to as the age-optimal policy) that jointly optimizes WET and scheduling of update packet transmissions with the objective of minimizing the long-term average weighted sum of Age-of-Information (AoI) values for different physical processes (observed by the source nodes) at the destination node, referred to as the sum-AoI. To solve this optimization problem, we first model this setup as an average cost Markov decision process (MDP). Due to the extreme curse of dimensionality in the state space of the formulated MDP, classical reinforcement learning algorithms are no longer applicable to our problem. Motivated by this, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm that can learn the age-optimal policy in a computationally-efficient manner. We further characterize the structural properties of the age-optimal policy analytically, and demonstrate that it has a threshold-based structure with respect to the AoI values for different processes. We extend our analysis to characterize the structural properties of the policy that maximizes average throughput for our system setup, referred to as the throughput-optimal policy. Afterwards, we analytically demonstrate that the structures of the age-optimal and throughput-optimal policies are different. We also numerically demonstrate these structures as well as the impact of system design parameters on the optimal achievable average weighted sum-AoI

Optimizing the Age-of-Information for Mobile Users in Adversarial and Stochastic Environments

We study a multi-user downlink scheduling problem for optimizing the freshness of information available to users roaming across multiple cells. We consider both adversarial and stochastic settings and design scheduling policies that optimize two distinct information freshness metrics, namely the average age-of-information and the peak age-of-information. We show that a natural greedy scheduling policy is competitive with the optimal offline policy in the adversarial setting. We also derive fundamental lower bounds to the competitive ratio achievable by any online policy. In the stochastic environment, we show that a Max-Weight scheduling policy that takes into account the channel statistics achieves an approximation factor of $2$ for minimizing the average age of information in two extreme mobility scenarios. We conclude the paper by establishing a large-deviation optimality result achieved by the greedy policy for minimizing the peak age of information for static users situated at a single cell.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2001.0547