Optimizing freshness of information: On minimum age link scheduling in wireless systems

Abstract

There is a growing interest in age of information, which is a newly introduced metric that measures the freshness of information in communication systems. We investigate the age of information in wireless networks and propose the novel approach of optimizing the scheduling strategy to deliver the information as timely as possible. We consider a set of links that share a common channel, each containing a number of packets with time stamps, and address the scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the overall information age. We model this problem mathematically and prove it is NP-hard in general. Fundamental insights including tractable cases and optimality conditions are presented. An integer linear programming formulation is provided for performance benchmarking. Moreover, a steepest age decent algorithm with better scalability is developed. Numerical study shows that, by employing the optimal schedule, the overall information age is significantly reduced in comparison to other scheduling strategies.