On the Age-Optimality of Relax-then-Truncate Approach Under Partial Battery Knowledge in Energy Harvesting IoT Networks

We consider an energy harvesting (EH) IoT network, where users make on-demand requests to a cache-enabled edge node to send status updates about various random processes, each monitored by an EH sensor. The edge node serves each user's request by either commanding the corresponding sensor to send a fresh status update or retrieving the most recently received measurement from the cache. We aim to find a control policy at the edge node that minimizes the average on-demand age of information (AoI) over all sensors subject to per-slot transmission and energy constraints under partial battery knowledge at the edge node. Namely, the limited radio resources (e.g., bandwidth) causes that only a limited number of sensors can send status updates at each time slot (i.e., per-slot transmission constraint) and the scarcity of energy for the EH sensors imposes an energy constraint. Besides, the edge node is informed of the sensors' battery levels only via received status update packets, leading to uncertainty about the battery levels for the decision-making. We develop a low-complexity algorithm - termed relax-then-truncate - and prove that it is asymptotically optimal as the number of sensors goes to infinity. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed method achieves significant gains over a request-aware greedy policy and show that it has near-optimal performance even for moderate numbers of sensors.