Waiting Before Serving: A Companion to Packet Management in Status Update Systems

In this paper, we explore the potential of server waiting before packet transmission in improving the Age of Information (AoI) in status update systems. We consider a non-preemptive queue with Poisson arrivals and independent general service distribution and we incorporate waiting before serving in two packet management schemes: M/GI/1/1 and M/GI/1/2*. In M/GI/1/1 there is no data buffer and a packet is taken to server only when it is idle whereas in M/GI/1/2* there is a single unit buffer that captures the latest arriving status update packet. In both schemes, we introduce “server waiting”: In M/GI/1/1 scheme, the server waits for a deterministic time immediately after a packet enters the server. In M/GI/1/2* scheme, depending on queue state, the server waits for a deterministic time before starting service. In both cases, if a newer arrival is captured, existing packet is discarded with no reset of the waiting period. Different from most existing works, we analyze AoI evolution by indexing the incoming packets, which is enabled by an alternative method of partitioning the area under the evolution of instantaneous AoI to calculate its time average. We obtain expressions for average AoI and average peak AoI for both queueing disciplines with waiting. Our numerical results demonstrate that waiting before service can bring significant improvement in average age, particularly, for heavy-tailed service distributions. This improvement comes at the expense of an increase in average peak AoI. We highlight the trade-off between average and average peak AoI generated by waiting before serving.