Scheduling Schemes for Age Optimization in IoT Systems With Limited Retransmission Times

Age of Information (AoI) is a recently introduced metric to capture data freshness. In this article, we consider a multiuser single-destination Internet of Things (IoT) system with periodic state updating, and investigate the scheduling methods of minimizing the long-term average AoI with limited retransmission times. In view of the retransmission mode, the AoI optimization problems for retransmission with and without feedback are analyzed. For the retransmission without feedback, we formulate the expected decision loss (EDL) function of the AoI optimization problem with the finite retransmission times and propose a loss-greedy policy by minimizing the EDL at each step. For the retransmission with feedback, a potential optimal solution is to construct the AoI optimization problem as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) and solve the corresponding Bellman optimal equations. However, this optimal solution is prone to suffer from the curse of dimensionality and is hard to implement. To address this issue, we decouple the infinite-horizon MDP into the finite-state MDP in each single frame, and then propose a low-complexity slot-based max-weight (SBMW) policy to minimize the long-term average AoI. Numerical results show that, compared with an ALOHA-like baseline policy, the proposed Loss-Greedy policy can achieve up to 48% reduction of the average AoI for the retransmission without feedback, while the SBMW policy can reduce the average AoI by 57% in the retransmission with feedback. The average performance gain of the proposed policies over the state-of-the-art policies is at least 10%.