A Comparison of Status Update Optimization and Microgrid Management

Provision of timely power supply to digital networks through smart microgrids represents a relevant research challenge. In next generation communication systems, high power demands are caused by the need for an efficient management of real-time content and guaranteeing up-to-date context awareness to computationally heavy applications. Such an integrated communication-energy challenge is gaining momentum in the research community, but, possibly due to different timescales, the problems of energy provision and data networking are often investigated with different approaches and mindsets. In this paper, we argue that they both stem from a fundamentals problem of efficient resource management that can ultimately be treated via dynamic programming as a unifying analytical tool. To this end, we show how the problems of energy management in a smart microgrid can be tackled through a framework conceived for the optimization of age of information. This allows to infer useful conclusions and, at the same time, the similarity can be expanded to leverage existing analytical procedure and derive efficient approaches, especially concerning the insertion of distributed intelligence in the control mechanisms.