Modeling of AoI Minimization for (m,k)-Firm Streams in 5G Networks

Abstract

Age of Information (AoI) is a new metric that indicates the freshness of information; especially, it is used to design schedulers in 5G networks. Recently, various AoI schedulers have been proposed to guarantee AoI deadlines for emerging applications in which the timeliness of information is critical. However, these schedulers face challenges in meeting the deadlines for all source nodes in situations wherein system resources are limited. To overcome this limitation, a violation-tolerant scheduler has been proposed; however, it does not consider the variance of violations over consecutive data, thereby resulting in significant information deficiencies over long periods of time. In this study, we consider the problem of scheduling a stream with (m, k)-firm deadlines, wherein at least m of any k consecutive data points must satisfy their deadlines. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic priority assignment technique and a priority-based physical resource block allocation algorithm. In addition, we introduce an open radio access network-based system model to enable practical deployment of the proposed solution. We built a 5G simulation environment using ns-3 and captured performance variations under realistic deployment scenarios. © 2023 IEEE.