Minimizing Age of Information under Arbitrary Arrival Model with Arbitrary Packet Size

We consider a single source-destination pair, where information updates arrive at the source at arbitrary time instants. For each update, its size, i.e. the service time required for complete transmission to the destination, is also arbitrary. At any time, age of information (AoI) is equal to the difference between the current time, and the arrival time of the latest update (at the source) that has been completely transmitted (to the destination). AoI quantifies the staleness of the update (information) at the destination. The goal is to find a causal scheduling policy that minimizes the time average of AoI, where the possible decisions at any time are i) whether to preempt the update under transmission upon arrival of a new update, and ii) if no update is under transmission, then choose which update to transmit (among the available updates). In this paper, we propose a causal policy called SRPT$^+$ that at each time, i) preempts the update under transmission if a new update arrives with a smaller size, and ii) if no update is under transmission, then begins to transmit the update for which the ratio of the reduction in AoI upon complete transmission (if not preempted in future) and the remaining size, is maximum. We characterize the performance of SRPT$^+$ using the metric called the competitive ratio, i.e. the ratio of the average AoI of causal policy and the average AoI of an optimal offline policy (that knows the entire input in advance), maximized over all possible inputs. We show that the competitive ratio of SRPT$^+$ is at most $4$. Further, we propose a simpler policy called SRPT$^L$, that i) preempts the update under transmission if a new update arrives with a smaller size, and ii) if no update is under transmission, then begins to transmit the update with the latest arrival time. We show that the competitive ratio of SRPT$^L$ is at most $29$.