A Whittle Index Approach to Minimizing Functions of Age of Information
Name
1908.10438.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
487.2 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
805ef25eb0dbcd572e7edefcb7979dbb
Author(s)
Tripathi, Vishrant
Modiano, Eytan
Date Issued
September 2019
Journal
2019 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2019
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Tripathi, Vishrant and Modiano, Eytan. 2019. "A Whittle Index Approach to Minimizing Functions of Age of Information." 2019 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2019.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
© 2019 IEEE. We consider a setting where multiple active sources send real-time updates over a single-hop wireless broadcast network to a monitoring station. Our goal is to design a scheduling policy that minimizes the time-average of general non-decreasing cost functions of Age of Information. We use a Whittle index based approach to find low complexity scheduling policies that have good performance, for reliable as well as unreliable channels. We prove that for a system with two sources, having possibly different cost functions and reliable channels, the Whittle index policy is exactly optimal. For reliable channels, we also derive structural properties of an optimal policy, that suggest that the performance of the Whittle index policy may be close to optimal in general. These results might also be of independent interest in the study of restless multi-armed bandit problems with similar underlying structure. Finally, we provide simulations comparing the Whittle index policy with optimal scheduling policies found using dynamic programming, which support our results.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/allerton.2019.8919842
