Optimizing information freshness online without knowing system details
Structure-Aware Online Optimization of the Age of Information with Unknown System Statistics
Information Theory
Summary
Keeping information up to date is important for systems that need quick, fresh data. But sending updates too often can cause delays, while too few updates make information stale. The authors designed a new way to automatically adjust update timing by learning key system features during use, without knowing everything in advance. This lets the system keep information fresh more efficiently even when the environment is uncertain.
What this means in practice
- •For network schedulers: Adjust update sending rates dynamically in communication networks where server or traffic details are unknown to keep data fresh.
- •For control system engineers: Optimize sensing and update timings in networked control systems with uncertain delays to improve real-time decision-making accuracy.
Authors
Yoshiaki Inoue, Michel Mandjes, Liron Ravner
Abstract
Timely information dissemination is essential in modern communication systems, where low informational latency is critical for networked control, monitoring, and real-time decision-making. The Age of Information (AoI) has emerged as a fundamental metric for quantifying information freshness at the receiver. A key challenge in AoI optimization is selecting the update generation rate: infrequent updates lead to stale information, whereas overly frequent updates increase queueing delays. We develop a structure-aware, data-driven framework for adaptive AoI optimization modeled as single-server queues with unknown system statistics. Our key idea is to exploit analytical representations of the AoI gradient, which depend on a finite-dimensional collection of system quantities that can be estimated from observations collected during system operation. This reduces the online learning problem to estimating the quantities required by the gradient, rather than learning the AoI objective as a black box. We propose an online stochastic approximation algorithm that jointly estimates these quantities and optimizes the update generation rate. We prove almost sure convergence of the algorithm to the optimal update generation rate under mild regularity and moment conditions, despite the temporal dependence induced by the underlying queueing process. We demonstrate the framework in four representative incomplete-information settings, including FCFS queues with unknown service characteristics or hidden background traffic, a preemptive LCFS system with partial observations, and a generate-at-will system with threshold waiting.