Competitive algorithms for minimizing the maximum age-of-information

In this short paper, we consider the problem of designing a near-optimal competitive scheduling policy to maximize the freshness of available information uniformly across N mobile users. Motivated by the unreliability and non-stationarity of the emerging 5G-mmWave channels for high-speed users, we forego of any statistical modeling assumptions of the wireless channels and user-mobility. Instead, we allow the channel states and the mobility patterns to be dictated by an omniscient adversary. It is not difficult to see that no competitive scheduling policy can exist for the corresponding throughput-maximization problem in this adversarial model. Surprisingly, we show that there exists a simple online distributed scheduling policy with a finite competitive ratio for maximizing the freshness of information in this model. We also prove that the proposed policy is competitively optimal up to an O(logN) factor.