A Whittle Index Approach to Minimizing Functions of Age of Information

Abstract

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.