We design a new scheduling policy to minimize the general non-decreasing cost function of age of information (AoI) in a multiuser system. In this system, the base station stochastically generates time-sensitive packets and transmits them to corresponding user equipments via an unreliable channel. We first formulate the transmission scheduling problem as an average cost constrained Markov decision process problem. Through introducing the service charge, we derive the closed-form expression for the Whittle index, based on which we design the scheduling policy. Using numerical results, we demonstrate the performance gain of our designed scheduling policy compared to the existing policies, such as the optimal policy, the on-demand Whittle index policy, and the age greedy policy.

中文翻译：

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最小化信息时代成本的基于惠特尔指数的调度策略

我们设计了一种新的调度策略来最小化多用户系统中信息年龄（AoI）的一般非递减成本函数。在该系统中，基站随机生成时间敏感的数据包，并通过不可靠的信道将其发送到相应的用户设备。我们首先将传输调度问题表述为一个平均成本约束马尔可夫决策过程问题。通过引入服务费，推导出Whittle指数的闭式表达式，并在此基础上设计调度策略。使用数值结果，我们展示了我们设计的调度策略与现有策略（例如最优策略、按需 Whittle 索引策略和年龄贪婪策略）相比的性能提升。