  Future wireless communication networks are envisioned to revolutionize the
digital world by offering super-low latency, unrivalled speed and reliable
communication. Consequently, a myriad of propitious applications such as
augmented/virtual reality, industry 4.0, etc., is anticipated to flourish.
These applications rely on real-time information to make critical decisions and
hence the temporal value of information generation and dissemination carries a
paramount importance. One of the acute challenges restraining to unleash the
full potentials of these applications is the time-varying wireless
communication environment implying the unpredictable fading effects. In this
paper, we consider a wireless network consisting of a base stations (BS) that
is serving multiple traffic streams to forward their information updates to the
destinations over an unreliable wireless channel. We study the benefits of
utilizing reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to mitigate the
propagation-induced impairments of the wireless environment, enhance the link
quality and ensure that the required freshness of information is achieved for
the real-time applications. To quantify the freshness of information at each
destination, we utilize the concept of Age of Information (AoI). AoI is
determined by the time for a fresh update to arrive to its queue at the BS till
it is successfully received at the destination. A joint RIS phase shift and
scheduling optimization problem is formulated with the goal of minimizing the
AoI. In order to solve this optimization problem, we propose an efficient
algorithm based on semi-definite relaxation (SDR). We then extend our proposed
system model and studied a use-case of real-time edge video analytics utilizing
multi-access edge computing (MEC) system. Finally, we perform extensive
simulations to verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods against other
approaches.
