Policy Gradient Algorithms for Age-of-Information Cost Minimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Vidal, José-Ramón, Pla, Vicent, Guijarro, Luis, Leyva-Mayorga, Israel
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Vidal, José-Ramón
Pla, Vicent
Guijarro, Luis
Leyva-Mayorga, Israel
author_facet Vidal, José-Ramón
Pla, Vicent
Guijarro, Luis
Leyva-Mayorga, Israel
contents Recent developments in cyber-physical systems have increased the importance of maximizing the freshness of the information about the physical environment. However, optimizing the access policies of Internet of Things devices to maximize the data freshness, measured as a function of the Age-of-Information (AoI) metric, is a challenging task. This work introduces two algorithms to optimize the information update process in cyber-physical systems operating under the generate-at-will model, by finding an online policy without knowing the characteristics of the transmission delay or the age cost function. The optimization seeks to minimize the time-average cost, which integrates the AoI at the receiver and the data transmission cost, making the approach suitable for a broad range of scenarios. Both algorithms employ policy gradient methods within the framework of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) and are specifically designed to handle continuous state and action spaces. Each algorithm minimizes the cost using a distinct strategy for deciding when to send an information update. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is feasible to apply the two strategies simultaneously, leading to an additional reduction in cost. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms exhibit good convergence properties and achieve a time-average cost within 3% of the optimal value, when the latter is computable. A comparison with other state-of-the-art methods shows that the proposed algorithms outperform them in one or more of the following aspects: being applicable to a broader range of scenarios, achieving a lower time-average cost, and requiring a computational cost at least one order of magnitude lower.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Policy Gradient Algorithms for Age-of-Information Cost Minimization
Vidal, José-Ramón
Pla, Vicent
Guijarro, Luis
Leyva-Mayorga, Israel
Networking and Internet Architecture
Information Theory
Machine Learning
Recent developments in cyber-physical systems have increased the importance of maximizing the freshness of the information about the physical environment. However, optimizing the access policies of Internet of Things devices to maximize the data freshness, measured as a function of the Age-of-Information (AoI) metric, is a challenging task. This work introduces two algorithms to optimize the information update process in cyber-physical systems operating under the generate-at-will model, by finding an online policy without knowing the characteristics of the transmission delay or the age cost function. The optimization seeks to minimize the time-average cost, which integrates the AoI at the receiver and the data transmission cost, making the approach suitable for a broad range of scenarios. Both algorithms employ policy gradient methods within the framework of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) and are specifically designed to handle continuous state and action spaces. Each algorithm minimizes the cost using a distinct strategy for deciding when to send an information update. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is feasible to apply the two strategies simultaneously, leading to an additional reduction in cost. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms exhibit good convergence properties and achieve a time-average cost within 3% of the optimal value, when the latter is computable. A comparison with other state-of-the-art methods shows that the proposed algorithms outperform them in one or more of the following aspects: being applicable to a broader range of scenarios, achieving a lower time-average cost, and requiring a computational cost at least one order of magnitude lower.
title Policy Gradient Algorithms for Age-of-Information Cost Minimization
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Information Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11990