In this paper, we investigate the scheduling design of a mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where active mobile devices with computation tasks randomly appear in a cell. Every task can be computed at either the mobile device or the MEC server. We jointly optimize the task offloading decision, uplink transmission device selection and power allocation by formulating the problem as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP). Compared with most of the existing literature, this is the first attempt to address the transmission and computation optimization with the random device arrivals in an infinite time horizon to our best knowledge. Due to the uncertainty in the device number and location, the conventional approximate MDP approaches addressing the curse of dimensionality cannot be applied. An alternative and suitable low-complexity solution framework is proposed in this work. We first introduce a baseline scheduling policy, whose value function can be derived analytically with the statistics of random mobile device arrivals. Then, one-step policy iteration is adopted to obtain a sub-optimal scheduling policy whose performance can be bounded analytically. The complexity of deriving the sub-optimal policy is reduced dramatically compared with conventional solutions of MDP by eliminating the complicated value iteration. To address a more general scenario where the statistics of random mobile device arrivals are unknown, a novel and efficient algorithm integrating reinforcement learning and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is proposed to improve the system performance in an online manner. Simulation results show that the gain of the sub-optimal policy over various benchmarks is significant.
Age of information is a new network performance metric that captures the freshness of information at end-users. This paper studies the age of information from a scheduling perspective. To that end, we consider a wireless broadcast network where a base-station (BS) is updating many users on random information arrivals under a transmission capacity constraint. For the offline case when the arrival statistics are known to the BS, we develop a structural MDP scheduling algorithm and an index scheduling algorithm, leveraging Markov decision process (MDP) techniques and the Whittle's methodology for…
In this paper, we investigate the scheduling design of a mobile-edge computing (MEC) system, where the random arrival of mobile devices with computation tasks in both spatial and temporal domains is considered. The binary computation offloading model is adopted. Every task is indivisible and can be computed at either the mobile device or the MEC server. We formulate the optimization of task offloading decision, uplink transmission device selection and power allocation in all the frames as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP). Due to the uncertainty in device number and location, c…
Age of information is a new concept that characterizes the freshness of information at end devices. This paper studies the age of information from a scheduling perspective. We consider a wireless broadcast network where a base-station updates many users on stochastic information arrivals. Suppose that only one user can be updated for each time. In this context, we aim at developing a transmission scheduling algorithm for minimizing the long-run average age. To develop a low-complexity transmission scheduling algorithm, we apply the Whittle's framework for restless bandits. We successfully deri…
In this paper, we consider a multiuser uplink status update system, where a monitor aims to timely collect randomly generated status updates from multiple end nodes through a shared wireless channel. We adopt the recently proposed metric, termed age of information (AoI), to quantify the information timeliness and freshness. Due to the random generation of the status updates at the end node side, the monitor only grasps a partial knowledge of the status update arrivals. Under such a practical scenario, we aim to address a fundamental multiuser scheduling problem: how to schedule the end nodes t…
We study age-agnostic scheduling in a non-preemptive status update system with two sources sending time-stamped information packets at random instances to a common monitor through a single server. The server is equipped with a waiting room holding the freshest packet from each source called "single-buffer per-source queueing". The server is assumed to be work-conserving and when the waiting room has two waiting packets (one from each source), a probabilistic scheduling policy is applied so as to provide Age of Information (AoI) differentiation for the two sources of interest. Assuming Poisson …
A multiple access system with bursty data arrivals to the terminals is considered. The users are frame-synchronized, with variable sized packets independently arriving in each slot at every transmitter. Each packet needs to be delivered to a common receiver within a certain number of slots specified by a maximum delay constraint. The key assumption is that the terminals know only their own packet arrival process, i.e. the arrivals at the rest of the terminals are unknown to each transmitter, except for their statistics. For this interesting distributed multiple access model, we design novel on…
This paper studies the user scheduling problem in a multiuser multiple-input multi-output (MIMO) status update system, in which multiple single-antenna devices aim to send their latest statuses to a multiple-antenna information-fusion access point (AP) via a shared wireless channel. The information freshness in the considered system is quantified by a recently proposed metric, termed age of information (AoI). Thanks to the extra spatial degrees-of-freedom brought about by the multiple antennas at the AP, multiple devices can be granted to transmit simultaneously in each time slot. We aim to se…
In this paper, we aim to obtain the optimal delay-power tradeoff and the corresponding optimal scheduling policy for an arbitrary i.i.d. arrival process and adaptive transmissions. The number of backlogged packets at the transmitter is known to a scheduler, who has to determine how many backlogged packets to transmit during each time slot. The power consumption is assumed to be convex in transmission rates. Hence, if the scheduler transmits faster, the delay will be reduced but with higher power consumption. To obtain the optimal delay-power tradeoff and the corresponding optimal policy, we mo…
The problem of online packet scheduling to minimize the required conventional grid energy for transmitting a fixed number of packets given a common deadline is considered. The total number of packets arriving within the deadline is known, but the packet arrival times are unknown, and can be arbitrary. The proposed algorithm tries to finish the transmission of each packet assuming all future packets are going to arrive at equal time intervals within the left-over time. The proposed online algorithm is shown to have competitive ratio that is logarithmic in the number of packet arrivals. The hybr…
We consider the optimal packet scheduling problem in a single-user energy harvesting wireless communication system. In this system, both the data packets and the harvested energy are modeled to arrive at the source node randomly. Our goal is to adaptively change the transmission rate according to the traffic load and available energy, such that the time by which all packets are delivered is minimized. Under a deterministic system setting, we assume that the energy harvesting times and harvested energy amounts are known before the transmission starts. For the data traffic arrivals, we consider …
Age of Information is a measure of the freshness of status updates in monitoring applications and update-based systems. We study a real-time remote sensing scenario with a sensor which is restricted by time-varying energy constraints and battery limitations. The sensor sends updates over a packet erasure channel with no feedback. The problem of finding an age-optimal threshold policy, with the transmission threshold being a function of the energy state and the estimated current age, is formulated. The average age is analyzed for the unit battery scenario under a memoryless energy arrival proce…
In the context of railway systems, the application performance can be very critical and the radio conditions not advantageous. Hence, the communication problem parameters include both a survival time stemming from the application layer and a channel error probability stemming from the PHY layer. This paper proposes to consider the framework of Markov Decision Process (MDP) to design a strategy for scheduling radio resources based on both application and PHY layer parameters. The MDP approach enables to obtain the optimal strategy via the value iteration algorithm. The performance of this algor…
In this paper, we deal with the problem of jointly determining the optimal coding strategy and the scheduling decisions when receivers obtain layered data from multiple servers. The layered data is encoded by means of Prioritized Random Linear Coding (PRLC) in order to be resilient to channel loss while respecting the unequal levels of importance in the data, and data blocks are transmitted simultaneously in order to reduce decoding delays and improve the delivery performance. We formulate the optimal coding and scheduling decisions problem in our novel framework with the help of Markov Decisi…
The Age-of-Information (AoI) is a new performance metric recently proposed for measuring the freshness of information in information-update systems. In this work, we conduct a systematic and comparative study to investigate the impact of scheduling policies on the AoI performance in single-server queues and provide useful guidelines for the design of AoI-efficient scheduling policies. Specifically, we first perform extensive simulations to demonstrate that the update-size information can be leveraged for achieving a substantially improved AoI compared to non-size-based (or arrival-time-based) …
This paper provides proofs of the rate stability, Harris recurrence, and epsilon-optimality of CSMA algorithms where the backoff parameter of each node is based on its backlog. These algorithms require only local information and are easy to implement. The setup is a network of wireless nodes with a fixed conflict graph that identifies pairs of nodes whose simultaneous transmissions conflict. The paper studies two algorithms. The first algorithm schedules transmissions to keep up with given arrival rates of packets. The second algorithm controls the arrivals in addition to the scheduling and at…
We consider a wireless uplink network consisting of multiple end devices and an access point (AP). Each device monitors a physical process with stochastic arrival of status updates and sends these updates to the AP over a shared channel. The AP aims to schedule the transmissions of these devices to optimize the network-wide information freshness, quantified by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. Due to the stochastic arrival of the status updates at the devices, the AP only has partial observations of system times of the latest status updates at the devices when making scheduling decisions. W…
We consider sensor scheduling as the optimal observability problem for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP). This model fits to the cases where a Markov process is observed by a single sensor which needs to be dynamically adjusted or by a set of sensors which are selected one at a time in a way that maximizes the information acquisition from the process. Similar to conventional POMDP problems, in this model the control action is based on all past measurements; however here this action is not for the control of state process, which is autonomous, but it is for influencing the …
Caching at small base stations (SBSs) has demonstrated significant benefits in alleviating the backhaul requirement in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). While many existing works focus on what contents to cache at each SBS, an equally important problem is what contents to deliver so as to satisfy dynamic user demands given the cache status. In this paper, we study optimal content delivery in cache-enabled HetNets by taking into account the inherent multicast capability of wireless medium. We consider stochastic content multicast scheduling to jointly minimize the average network delay…
In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless network is considered in which a battery-constrained UAV is assumed to move towards energy-constrained ground nodes to receive status updates about their observed processes. The UAV's flight trajectory and scheduling of status updates are jointly optimized with the objective of minimizing the normalized weighted sum of Age of Information (NWAoI) values for different physical processes at the UAV. The problem is first formulated as a mixed-integer program. Then, for a given scheduling policy, a convex optimization-based solution …
In this paper, downlink transmission scheduling of popular files is optimized with the assistance of wireless cache nodes. Specifically, the requests of each file, which is further divided into a number of segments, are modeled as a Poisson point process within its finite lifetime. Two downlink transmission modes are considered: (1) the base station reactively multicasts the file segments to the requesting users and selected cache nodes; (2) the base station proactively multicasts some file segments to the selected cache nodes without requests. The cache nodes with decoded file segments can he…
With the rapid growth of real-time Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the need for fresh information has surged. Age of Information (AoI) is a tailor-made metric to characterize the information freshness perceived by the devices. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scheduling updates to minimize AoI in broadcast network. In this case, a central controller, e.g. a base station, collects status updates from different sources and schedules them to corresponding clients. Different from previous work, we consider both stochastic status updates and unreliable links. The problem is first…
Caching and multicasting at base stations are two promising approaches to support massive content delivery over wireless networks. However, existing scheduling designs do not make full use of the advantages of the two approaches. In this paper, we consider the optimal dynamic multicast scheduling to jointly minimize the average delay, power, and fetching costs for cache-enabled content-centric wireless networks. We formulate this stochastic optimization problem as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP). It is well-known to be a difficult problem due to the curse of dime…
In this work, we aim to obtain the optimal tradeoff between the average delay and the average power consumption in a communication system. In our system, the arrivals occur at each timeslot according to a Bernoulli arrival process and are buffered at the transmitter. The transmitter determines the scheduling policy of how many packets to transmit under an average power constraint. The power is assumed to be an increasing and convex function of the number of packets transmitted in each timeslot to capture the realism in communication systems. We also consider a finite buffer and allow the sched…
We consider an Internet of Things (IoT) system in which a sensor delivers updates to a monitor with exponential service time and first-come-first-served (FCFS) discipline. We investigate the freshness of the received updates and propose a new metric termed as \textit{Age upon Decisions (AuD)}, which is defined as the time elapsed from the generation of each update to the epoch it is used to make decisions (e.g., estimations, inferences, controls). Within this framework, we aim at improving the freshness of updates at decision epochs by scheduling the update arrival process and the decision mak…
We consider a wireless network with a base station serving multiple traffic streams to different destinations. Packets from each stream arrive to the base station according to a stochastic process and are enqueued in a separate (per stream) queue. The queueing discipline controls which packet within each queue is available for transmission. The base station decides, at every time t, which stream to serve to the corresponding destination. The goal of scheduling decisions is to keep the information at the destinations fresh. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metri…
In this paper, we investigate scheduling policies that minimize the age of information in single-hop queueing systems. We propose a Last-Generated, First-Serve (LGFS) scheduling policy, in which the packet with the earliest generation time is processed with the highest priority. If the service times are i.i.d. exponentially distributed, the preemptive LGFS policy is proven to be age-optimal in a stochastic ordering sense. If the service times are i.i.d. and satisfy a New-Better-than-Used (NBU) distributional property, the non-preemptive LGFS policy is shown to be within a constant gap from the…
This paper investigates the tradeoff between the average age of information (AoI) and the transmission cost for networks with stochastic packet arrival and random erasure channel. Specifically, we model the resource-constrained AoI minimization problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) and propose a low-complexity single threshold packet scheduling policy for it. The key advantage of the proposed policy is its tractability and convenience for implementation. The AoI distribution and long-term average transmission cost of the proposed policy are derived as closed-form functions of…
We analyze the delay performance of small cell networks operating under random scheduling (RS) and round robin (RR) protocols. Based on stochastic geometry and queuing theory, we derive accurate and tractable expressions for the distribution of mean delay, which accounts for the impact of random traffic arrivals, queuing interactions, and failed packet retransmissions. Our analysis asserts that RR outperforms RS in terms of mean delay, regardless of traffic statistic. Moreover, the gain from RR is more pronounced in the presence of heavy traffic, which confirms the importance of accounting fai…
In this work, a wireless broadcast network with a base station (BS) sending random time-sensitive information updates to multiple users with interference constraints is considered. The Age of Synchronization (AoS), namely the amount of time elapsed since the information stored at the network user becomes desynchronized, is adopted to measure data freshness from the perspective of network users. Compared with the more widely used metric---the Age of Information (AoI), AoS accounts for the freshness of the randomly changing content. The AoS minimization scheduling problem is formulated into a di…
In a typical Internet of Things (IoT) application where a central controller collects status updates from multiple terminals, e.g., sensors and monitors, through a wireless multiaccess uplink, an important problem is how to attain timely status updates autonomously. In this paper, the timeliness of the status is measured by the recently proposed age-of-information (AoI) metric; both the theoretical and practical aspects of the problem are investigated: we aim to obtain a scheduling policy with minimum AoI and, meanwhile, still suitable for decentralized implementation on account of signalling …
Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) is an emerging technology for enhancing mobiles' computation capabilities and prolonging their battery lives, by offloading intensive computation from mobiles to nearby servers such as base stations. In this paper, we study the energy-efficient resource-management policy for the asynchronous MECO system, where the mobiles have heterogeneous input-data arrival time instants and computation deadlines. First, we consider the general case with arbitrary arrival-deadline orders. Based on the monomial energy-consumption model for data transmission, an optimi…
