Trading Off Computation with Transmission in Status Update Systems

Abstract: This paper is motivated by emerging edge computing applications in which generated data are pre-processed at the source and then transmitted to an edge server. In such a scenario, there is typically a tradeoff between the amount of pre-processing and the amount of data to be transmitted. We model such a system by considering two non-preemptive queues in tandem whose service times are independent over time but the transmission service time is dependent on the computation service time in mean value. The first queue is in M/GI/1/1 form with a single server, memoryless exponential arrivals, general independent service and no extra buffer to save incoming status update packets. The second queue is in GI/M/1/2* form with a single server receiving packets from the first queue, memoryless service and a single data buffer to save incoming packets. Additionally, mean service times of the first and second queues are dependent through a deterministic monotonic function. We perform stationary distribution analysis in this system and obtain closed form expressions for average age of information (AoI) and average peak AoI. Our numerical results illustrate the analytical findings and highlight the tradeoff between average AoI and average peak AoI generated by the tandem nature of the queueing system with dependent service times.