Age-of-Information Aware Scheduling

We study the task of scheduling in a multi-source system where sources report their time-varying information to a central monitoring station via multiple orthogonal channels. The Age-of-Information of a source is defined as the amount of time elapsed since the latest update from that source was received at the monitoring station. At each time instant, the system pays a cost that is a function of the current Ages-of-Information of the sources. Our goal is to design scheduling policies to minimize this cost. We draw a novel parallel between our scheduling problem and the minimum mean cost cycle problem in weighted graphs and use this insight to design optimal scheduling policies for a very general class of cost functions. In addition, we compare the performance of our policy with naive greedy policies. We show that while greedy policies can be optimal if the cost function is symmetric with respect to the sources, our policy strictly outperforms greedy policies when the cost function is asymmetric across sources.