Not Just Age but Age and Quality of Information

A versatile scheduling problem to model a three-way tradeoff between age of information (AoI), quality/distortion, and energy is considered. The considered problem called the age and quality of information (AQI) is to select which packets to transmit at each time slot to minimize a linear combination of the utility driven by quality, the AoI, and the energy transmission cost in an online fashion. AQI problem combines tradeoffs from some important distinct problems, such as AoI with multiple sources, the remote sampling problem with sampling constraint, the classical speed scaling problem among others. The arbitrary/adversarial case input model is considered in the online setting, where the performance metric is the competitive ratio. A greedy algorithm is proposed that is shown to be 2-competitive, independent of all parameters of the problem. For the special case of AQI problem, a maximum weight matching based algorithm is also shown to be 2-competitive.