Hybrid Status Update Systems with Dedicated and Shared Servers

Use of multi-path network topologies has become a prominent technique to assert timeliness in terms of age of information (AoI) and to improve resilience to link disruptions in communication systems. However, establishing multiple dedicated communication links among network nodes is a costly endeavor. Therefore, quite often, these secondary communication links are shared among multiple entities. Moreover, these multi-path networks come with the added challenge of out-of-order transmissions. In this paper, we study an amalgamation of the above two aspects, i.e., multi-path transmissions and link sharing. In this setting, we devise age-minimal scheduling schemes for a status update system composed of multiple sources sharing a single-server while having a separate dedicated server for each source so as to improve its timeliness.