Age-aware Scheduling for Asynchronous Arriving Jobs in Edge Applications

Age of information has been proposed recently to measure information freshness, especially for a class of real-time video applications. These applications often demand timely updates with edge cloud computing to guarantee the user experience. However, the edge cloud is usually equipped with limited computation and network resources and therefore, resource contention among different video streams can contribute to making the updates stale. Aiming to minimize a penalty function of the weighted sum of the average age over multiple end users, this paper presents a greedy traffic scheduling policy for the processor to choose the next processing request with the maximum immediate penalty reduction. In this work, we formulate the service process when requests from multiple users arrive at edge cloud servers asynchronously and show that the proposed greedy scheduling algorithm is the optimal work-conserving policy for a class of age penalty functions.