Age-of-Information Revisited: Two-way Delay and Distribution-oblivious Online Algorithm

Abstract

The ever-increasing needs of supporting real-time applications have spurred a considerable number of studies on minimizing Age-of-Information (AoI), a new metric characterizing the data freshness of the system. This work revisits and significantly strengthens the seminal results of Sun et al. on the following fronts: (i) The optimal waiting policy is generalized from the 1-way delay to the 2-way delay setting; (ii) A new way of computing the optimal policy with quadratic convergence rate, an order-of-magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art bisection methods; and (iii) A new low-complexity adaptive online algorithm that provably converges to the optimal policy without knowing the exact delay distribution, a sharp departure from the existing AoI algorithms. Contribution (iii) is especially important in practice since the delay distribution can sometimes be hard to know in advance and may change over time. Simulation results in various settings are consistent with the theoretic findings.