We study the task of scheduling in a multi-source system where sources report their time-varying information to a central monitoring station via multiple orthogonal channels. The Age-of-Information of a source is defined as the amount of time elapsed since the latest update from that source was received at the monitoring station. At each time instant, the system pays a cost that is a function of the current Ages-of-Information of the sources. Our goal is to design scheduling policies to minimize this cost. We draw a novel parallel between our scheduling problem and the minimum mean cost cycle problem in weighted graphs and use this insight to design optimal scheduling policies for a very general class of cost functions. In addition, we compare the performance of our policy with naive greedy policies. We show that while greedy policies can be optimal if the cost function is symmetric with respect to the sources, our policy strictly outperforms greedy policies when the cost function is asymmetric across sources.

中文翻译：

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图中的最优 AoI 感知调度和周期

我们研究了多源系统中的调度任务，其中源通过多个正交信道向中央监测站报告其时变信息。源的信息年龄定义为自监测站收到来自该源的最新更新以来经过的时间量。在每个时刻，系统都会支付一个成本，该成本是源当前信息年龄的函数。我们的目标是设计调度策略以最小化此成本。我们在我们的调度问题和加权图中的最小平均成本周期问题之间绘制了一个新的平行关系，并使用这种洞察力为非常一般的成本函数类设计最佳调度策略。此外，我们将我们的策略与朴素贪婪策略的性能进行了比较。