Minimizing Age of Information under Latency and Throughput Constraints

We consider a scheduling problem pertinent to a base station (BS) that serves heterogeneous users (UEs). We focus on a downlink model, with users that are either interested in large throughput, low latency (the time difference between the packet arrival at the BS, and reception at the UE), or low age-of-information (AoI, the difference between the current time and the arrival time of the latest packet at the BS that has been received at the UE). In each time step, the BS may serve a limited number of UEs. The objective is to find a scheduling algorithm that meets the individual service requirements of all the UEs. In this paper, we formulate the aforementioned objective as an optimization problem, and propose candidate solutions (algorithms) that rationalize the tradeoff between throughput, latency and the AoI. Then, we analyze the performance of the proposed algorithms both analytically and numerically, and discuss techniques to extend their applicability to other general setups.