Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Zhuoyi, Kadota, Igor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909039324037120
author Zhao, Zhuoyi
Kadota, Igor
author_facet Zhao, Zhuoyi
Kadota, Igor
contents We consider a 5G cellular network where a gNB schedules time-sensitive uplink transmissions from multiple UEs and forwards received packets to remote destinations. In practical 5G networks, the gNB does not directly observe the destination-side Age of Information (AoI) and must make scheduling decisions under stringent slot-level runtime constraints. In this paper, we develop a low-complexity AoI-aware scheduling policy for 5G cellular under limited observability. We first design a low-complexity estimator that infers UE-side packet timestamps and destination-side AoI from gNB-visible observations. Based on these estimates, we propose and implement a Max-Weight policy (MW-LC) in NetSim, a 5G emulator with a standards-compatible protocol stack, to showcase its performance against baseline 5G scheduling policies. Furthermore, we use MATLAB simulations to show that the LC estimator and MW-LC achieve performance close to a richer estimator-based AoI policy from the literature. The estimator may be of independent interest to the community, enabling AoI-aware algorithms beyond 5G scheduling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular
Zhao, Zhuoyi
Kadota, Igor
Networking and Internet Architecture
We consider a 5G cellular network where a gNB schedules time-sensitive uplink transmissions from multiple UEs and forwards received packets to remote destinations. In practical 5G networks, the gNB does not directly observe the destination-side Age of Information (AoI) and must make scheduling decisions under stringent slot-level runtime constraints. In this paper, we develop a low-complexity AoI-aware scheduling policy for 5G cellular under limited observability. We first design a low-complexity estimator that infers UE-side packet timestamps and destination-side AoI from gNB-visible observations. Based on these estimates, we propose and implement a Max-Weight policy (MW-LC) in NetSim, a 5G emulator with a standards-compatible protocol stack, to showcase its performance against baseline 5G scheduling policies. Furthermore, we use MATLAB simulations to show that the LC estimator and MW-LC achieve performance close to a richer estimator-based AoI policy from the literature. The estimator may be of independent interest to the community, enabling AoI-aware algorithms beyond 5G scheduling.
title Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13012