Controlling Packet Drops to Improve Freshness of information

Veeraruna Kavitha (1) , Eitan Altman (2, 3, 4)

1 IIT Bombay - Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
2 NEO - Network Engineering and Operations
3 LIA - Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon
4 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences

Many systems require frequent and regular updates of certain information. These updates have to be transferred regularly from the source(s) to a common destination. We consider scenarios in which an old packet (entire information unit) becomes completely obsolete, in the presence of a new packet. We consider transmission channels with unit storage capacity; upon arrival of a new packet, if another packet is being transmitted then one of the packets is lost. We consider the control problem that consists of deciding which packet to discard so as to max-imise the average age of information (AAoI). We derive drop policies that optimize the AAoI. We show that the state independent (static) policies like dropping always the old packets or dropping always the new packets are optimal in many scenarios, among an appropriate set of stationary Markov policies.

Mots clés: Age of Information; Freshness of information; Lossy systems; Re- newal Processes; Dynamic and static policies

Domaines: Probabilités [math.PR]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Veeraruna Kavitha, Eitan Altman. Controlling Packet Drops to Improve Freshness of information. Netgcoop 2020 - International Conference on NETwork Games, Control and Optimisation, Sep 2021, Cargese, France. ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-87473-5_7⟩. ⟨hal-02931314⟩