Joint Near-Optimal Age-based Data Transmission and Energy Replenishment Scheduling at Wireless-Powered Network Edge

Age of Information (AoI), emerged as a new metric to quantify the data freshness, has attracted increasing interests recently. Most existing works try to optimize the system AoI from the point of data transmission. Unfortunately, at wireless-powered network edge, the charging schedule of the source nodes also needs to be decided besides data transmission. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the joint scheduling problem of data transmission and energy replenishment to optimize the peak AoI at network edge with directional chargers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers such two problems simultaneously. Firstly, the theoretical bounds of the peak AoI with respect to the charging latency are derived. Secondly, for the minimum peak AoI scheduling problem with a single charger, an optimal scheduling algorithm is proposed to minimize the charging latency, and then a data transmission scheduling strategy is also given to optimize the peak AoI. The proposed algorithm is proved to have a constant approximation ratio of up to 1.5. When there exist multiple chargers, an approximate algorithm is also proposed to minimize the charging latency and peak AoI. Finally, the simulation results verify the high performance of proposed algorithms in terms of AoI.