We consider the problem of timely exchange of updates between a central station and a set of ground terminals V , via a mobile agent that traverses across the ground terminals along a mobility graph G = (V, E). We design the trajectory of the mobile agent to minimize peak and average age of information (AoI), two newly proposed metrics for measuring timeliness of information. We consider randomized trajectories, in which the mobile agent travels from terminal i to terminal j with probability Pi,j. For the information gathering problem, we show that a randomized trajectory is peak age optimal and factor-8H average age optimal, where H is the mixing time of the randomized trajectory on the mobility graph G. We also show that the average age minimization problem is NP-hard. For the information dissemination problem, we prove that the same randomized trajectory is factor-O(H) peak and average age optimal. Moreover, we propose an age-based trajectory, which utilizes information about current age at terminals, and show that it is factor-2 average age optimal in a symmetric setting.
The paper REF considers the problem of designing an AoI-optimal trajectory for a mobile agent which facilitates information dissemination from a central station to a set of ground terminals.
Age Optimal Information Gathering and Dissemination on Graphs
IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
Computer Science Mathematics