Kronos: A 5G Scheduler for AoI Minimization Under Dynamic Channel Conditions

Age of information (AoI) is a powerful new metric to quantify the freshness of information and has gained increasing popularity in IoT applications. Existing models on AoI remain primitive and do not consider state-of-the-art transmission technologies such as 5G. They also fail to consider the impact of dynamic channel conditions. In this paper, we present Kronos, a 5G-compliant AoI scheduling algorithm that can cope with highly dynamic channel conditions. Kronos is capable of performing RB allocation and selecting MCS for each source node based on channel conditions, with the objective of minimizing long-term AoI. To meet the stringent real-time requirement for 5G, we propose a GPU-based implementation of Kronos on low-cost offthe-shelf GPUs. Through simulations and experiments, we show that Kronos can find near-optimal AoI scheduling solutions in sub-millisecond time scale. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first 5G-compliant real-time AoI scheduler that can cope with dynamic channel conditions.