Implementation and Evaluation of Age-Aware Downlink Scheduling Policies

Abstract

A wireless network with a single transmitter (base station) and multiple receivers is implemented using Software Defined Radios. The base station (BS) needs to send time-sensitive packets to the receivers. Channels between the BS and receivers are time varying, and the base station can send to only one user in each time slot. Round Robin, Greedy, Max-Weight, and Whittle's Index Policies from the literature are implemented for the link activation decision of the BS, and compared with respect to the time average Age of Information (AoI) achieved. Average packet success rates of each channel are used to compute the theoretical lower bounds on the expected AoI in each link. The ratio of the measured long-term average AoI to the lower bound is used as a performance criterion to evaluate the scheduling policy performance independently of the channel status variations between experiments. © 2021 IEEE.