Whittle Index Based Scheduling Policy for Minimizing the Cost of Age of Information

Abstract: We design a new scheduling policy to minimize the general non-decreasing cost function of age of information (AoI) in a multiuser system. In this system, the base station stochastically generates time-sensitive packets and transmits them to corresponding user equipments via an unreliable channel. We first formulate the transmission scheduling problem as an average cost constrained Markov decision process problem. Through introducing the service charge, we derive the closed-form expression for the Whittle index, based on which we design the scheduling policy. Using numerical results, we demonstrate the performance gain of our designed scheduling policy compared to the existing policies, such as the optimal policy, the on-demand Whittle index policy, and the age greedy policy.