Ao2I: Minimizing Age of Outdated Information to Improve Freshness in Data Collection

Recently, it has been recognized that there is a serious limitation with the original Age of Information (AoI) metric in terms of quantifying true freshness of information content. A new metric, called Age of Incorrect Information (AoII), has been proposed. By further refining this new metric with practical considerations, we introduce Age of Outdated Information (Ao
²
I) metric. In this paper, we investigate a scheduling problem for minimizing Ao
²
I in an IoT data collection network. We derive a theoretical lower bound for the minimum Ao
²
I that any scheduler can achieve. Then we present Heh—a low-complexity online scheduler. The design of Heh is based on the estimation of a novel offline scheduling priority metric in the absence of knowledge of the future. We prove that at each time, transmitting one source with the largest offline scheduling priority metric minimizes Ao
²
I. Through extensive simulations, we show that the lower bound is very tight and that the Ao
²
I obtained by Heh is close-to-optimal.