Scheduling the transmission of status updates over an error-prone communication channel is studied in order to minimize the long-term average age of information (AoI) at the destination under a constraint on the average number of transmissions at the source node. After each transmission, the source receives an instantaneous ACK NACK feedback, and decides on the next update without prior knowledge on the success of future transmissions. First, the optimal scheduling policy is studied under different feedback mechanisms when the channel statistics are known; in particular, the standard automatic repeat request (ARQ) and hybrid ARQ (HARQ) protocols are considered. Then, for an unknown environment, an average-cost reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is proposed that learns the system parameters and the transmission policy in real time. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are verified through numerical simulations.
We consider the peak age-of-information (PAoI) in an M M 1 queueing system with packet delivery error, i.e., update packets can get lost during transmissions to their destination. We focus on two types of policies, one is to adopt Last-Come-First-Served (LCFS) scheduling, and the other is to utilize retransmissions, i.e., keep transmitting the most recent packet. Both policies can effectively avoid the queueing delay of a busy channel and ensure a small PAoI. Exact PAoI expressions under both policies with different error probabilities are derived, including First-Come-First-Served (FCFS), LCFS with preemptive priority, LCFS with non-preemptive priority, Retransmission with preemptive priority, and Retransmission with non-preemptive priority. Numerical results obtained from analysis and simulation are presented to validate our results.