Scheduling Algorithms for Minimizing the Age of Synchronization in Wireless Networks with Random Updates under Throughput Constraints

Abstract

This study considers a wireless network where multiple nodes transmit status updates to a base station (BS) via a shared, error-free channel with limited bandwidth. The status updates arrive at each node randomly. We use the Age of Synchronization (AoS) as a metric to measure the information freshness of the updates. The AoS of each node has a timelyvarying importance which follows a Markov chain. Our objective is to minimize the weighted sum AoS of the system. The optimization problem is relaxed and formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Solving the relaxed CMDP by a linear programming algorithm yields a stationary policy, which helps us propose a near-stationary policy for the original problem. Numerical simulations show that in most configurations, the AoS performance of our policy outperforms the policy choosing the maximum AoS regardless of weight variations.

Age of Synchronization Minimization Algorithms in Wireless Networks with Random Updates under Throughput Constraints

“…To be specific, we propose the optimal stationary randomized policy, the max-weight policy, and the distributed policy to deal with ACK-available/ACK-unavailable and centralized/distributed scenarios, respectively. Part of this work has been published in Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB) [ 24 ].…”