Age of Information of a Server with Energy Requirements

We investigate a system with Poisson arrivals to two queues. One queue stores the status updates of the process of interest (or data packets) and the other handles the energy that is required to deliver the updates to the monitor. We consider that the energy is represented by packets of discrete unit. When an update ends service, it is sent to the energy queue and, if the energy queue has one packet, the update is delivered successfully and the energy packet disappears; however, in case the energy queue is empty, the update is lost. Both queues can handle, at most, one packet and the service time of updates is exponentially distributed. Using the Stochastic Hybrid System method, we characterize the average Age of Information of this system. Due to the difficulty of the derived expression, we also explore approximations of the average Age of Information of this systemJosu Doncel has received funding from the Department of Education of the Basque Government through the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19), from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 777778 and from from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with reference PID2019-108111RB-I00 (FEDER/AEI). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscrip

Age of Information of Parallel Server Systems with Energy Harvesting

Motivated by current communication networks in which users can choose different transmission channels to operate and also by the recent growth of renewable energy sources, we study the average Age of Information of a status update system that is formed by two parallel homogeneous servers and such that there is an energy source that feeds the system following a random process. An update, after getting service, is delivered to the monitor if there is energy in a battery. However, if the battery is empty, the status update is lost. We allow preemption of updates in service and we assume Poisson generation times of status updates and exponential service times. We show that the average Age of Information can be characterized by solving a system with eight linear equations. Then, we show that, when the arrival rate to both servers is large, the average Age of Information is one divided by the sum of the service rates of the servers. We also perform a numerical analysis to compare the performance of our model with that of a single server with energy harvesting and to study in detail the aforementioned convergence result.Josu Doncel has received funding from the Department of Education of the Basque Government through the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19), from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 777778 and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with reference PID2019-108111RB-I00 (FEDER/AEI)

Asymptotically Optimal Size-Interval Task Assignments

International audienceSize-based routing provides robust strategies to improve the performance of computer and communication systems with highly variable workloads because it is able to isolate small jobs from large ones in a static manner. The basic idea is that each server is assigned all jobs whose sizes belong to a distinct and continuous interval. In the literature, dispatching rules of this type are referred to as SITA (Size Interval Task Assignment) policies. Though their evident benefits, the problem of finding a SITA policy that minimizes the overall mean (steady-state) waiting time is known to be intractable. In particular it is not clear when it is preferable to balance or unbalance server loads and, in the latter case, how. In this paper, we provide an answer to these questions in the celebrated limiting regime where the system capacity grows linearly with the system demand to infinity. Within this framework, we prove that the minimum mean waiting time achievable by a SITA policy necessarily converges to the mean waiting time achieved by SITA-E, the SITA policy that equalizes server loads, provided that servers are homogeneous. However, within the set of SITA policies we also show that SITA-E can perform arbitrarily bad if servers are heterogeneous. In this case we prove that there exist exactly C! asymptotically optimal policies, where C denotes the number of server types, and all of them are linked to the solution of a single strictly convex optimization problem. It turns out that the mean waiting time achieved by any of such asymptotically optimal policies does not depend on how job-size intervals are mapped to servers. Our theoretical results are validated by numerical simulations with respect to realistic parameters and suggest that the above insights are also accurate in small systems composed of a few servers, i.e., ten

Age of Information in a Decentralized Network of Parallel Queues with Routing and Packets Losses

The paper deals with age of information (AoI) in a network of multiple sources and parallel queues with buffering capabilities, preemption in service and losses in served packets. The queues do not communicate between each other and the packets are dispatched through the queues according to a predefined probabilistic routing. By making use of the stochastic hybrid system (SHS) method, we provide a derivation of the average AoI of a system of two parallel queues (with and without buffer capabilities) and compare the results with those of a single queue. We show that known results of packets delay in Queuing Theory do not hold for the AoI. Unfortunately, the complexity of computing the average AoI using the SHS method increases highly with the number of queues. We therefore provide an upper bound of the average AoI in a system of an arbitrary number of M/M/1/(N+1)* queues and show its tightness in various regimes. This upper bound allows providing a tight approximation of the average AoI with a very low complexity. We then provide a game framework that allows each source to determine its best probabilistic routing decision. By using Mean Field Games, we provide an analysis of the routing game framework, propose an efficient iterative method to find the routing decision of each source and prove its convergence to the desired equilibrium.The work of Josu Doncel was supported in part by the Department of Education of the Basque Government through the ConSolidated Research Group MATH MODE under Grant IT1294-19; in part by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie under Grant 777778; and in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2019-108111RB-I00 (FEDER/AEI)

Analysis of the Refined Mean-Field Approximation for the 802.11 Protocol Model

Mean-field approximation is a method to investigate the behavior of stochastic models formed by a large number of interacting objects. A new approximation was recently established, i.e., the refined mean-field approximation, and its high accuracy when the number of objects is small has been shown. In this work, we consider the model of the 802.11 protocol, which is a discrete-time model and show how the refined mean-field approximation can be adapted to this model. Our results confirm the accuracy of the refined mean-field approximation when the model with N objects is in discrete time.This research was founded by the Department of Education of the Basque Government, Spain, through the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1456-22) and by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie, grant agreement number 777778

Optimal performance of parallel-server systems with job size prediction errors

[EN] Modern communication networks integrate distributed computing architectures, in which customers are processed in parallel. We show how to minimize the waiting time of customer’s jobs by leveraging a simple threshold-based job dispatching policy. The optimal policy leverages the SITA routing, which assigns jobs to servers according to the size of the job. Moreover, the optimal policy permits to optimize system performance even when the job size is not known a priori and is estimated by means of error-prone predictors.The work of Josu Doncel has been supported by the Department of Education of the Basque Government through the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19), by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 777778 and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with reference PID2019-108111RB-I00 (FEDER/AEI). The work of Vincenzo Mancuso has been supported by the Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2014-16285 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and by the Region of Madrid through the TAPIR-CM program (S2018/TCS-4496)

Size-Based Routing Policies: Non-Asymptotic Analysis and Design of Decentralized Systems

Size-based routing policies are known to perform well when the variance of the distribution of the job size is very high. We consider two size-based policies in this paper: Task Assignment with Guessing Size (TAGS) and Size Interval Task Assignment (SITA). The latter assumes that the size of jobs is known, whereas the former does not. Recently, it has been shown by our previous work that when the ratio of the largest to shortest job tends to infinity and the system load is fixed and low, the average waiting time of SITA is, at most, two times less than that of TAGS. In this article, we first analyze the ratio between the mean waiting time of TAGS and the mean waiting time of SITA in a non-asymptotic regime, and we show that for two servers, and when the job size distribution is Bounded Pareto with parameter α=1, this ratio is unbounded from above. We then consider a system with an arbitrary number of servers and we compare the mean waiting time of TAGS with that of Size Interval Task Assignment with Equal load (SITA-E), which is a SITA policy where the load of all the servers are equal. We show that in the light traffic regime, the performance ratio under consideration is unbounded from above when (i) the job size distribution is Bounded Pareto with parameter α=1 and an arbitrary number of servers as well as (ii) for Bounded Pareto distributed job sizes with α∈(0,2)\{1} and the number of servers tends to infinity. Finally, we use the result of our previous work to show how to design decentralized systems with quality of service constraints.Josu Doncel has received funding from the Department of Education of the Basque Government through the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19), from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 777778, and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with reference PID2019-108111RB-I00 (FEDER/AEI). Eitan Bachmat’s work was supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) through the grant, Airplane Boarding, (JA 2311/3-1)

On the Age of Information of Processor Sharing Systems

In this paper, we examine the Age of Information (AoI) of a source sending status updates to a monitor through a queue operating under the Processor Sharing (PS) discipline. In the PS queueing discipline, all the updates are served simultaneously and, therefore, none of of the jobs wait in the queue to get service. While AoI has been well studied for various queuing models and policies, less attention has been given so far to the PS discipline. We first consider the M/M/1/2 queue with and without preemption and provide closed-form expressions for the average AoI in this case. We overcome the challenges of deriving the AoI expression by employing the Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS) tool. We then extend the analysis to the M/M/1 queue with one and two sources and provide numerical results for these cases. Our results show that PS can outperform the M/M/1/1* queue in some cases