Near-optimal uplink scheduling for age-energy tradeoff in wireless systems

We study the optimal age-energy tradeoff arising in the context uplink scheduling of multiple heterogeneous devices that are transmitting time-sensitive update packets through the base station in a cellular network. In the model, new updates arrive stochastically at the devices and they are subject to losses when attempting to transmit. Also, associated with the update transmission are related energy costs. The problem is to develop policies for minimizing the weighted sum of the total mean age and energy costs. The Whittle index approach is applied to obtain a near-optimal policy. In particular, we prove the indexability of the problem and explicitly derive the associated Whittle indices. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of the resulting Energy-aware Whittle index policy compared with other heuristics.