TSDM: A Scheduling Policy for Joint Throughput-AoI Optimization in Multichannel Wireless Networks

Abstract

Optimizing for both low Age of Information (AoI) and high throughput is critical for remote sensing applications that rely on multichannel wireless networks. However, jointly optimizing these two metrics is an analytically challenging problem, particularly in systems with heterogeneous and unreliable channels. To address this challenge, we propose TSDM, a Two-Stage Deficit Matching scheduling framework. TSDM is based on a second-order approach that characterizes the performance of each data flow by its mean and temporal variance. In the first stage, TSDM translates the high-level utility maximization objective into a concrete set of target mean and temporal variance statistics for transmissions over each node-channel pair. In the second stage, a low-complexity Weighted Matching Deficit (WMD) rule performs real-time channel assignment. We theoretically prove that TSDM achieves the desired mean and temporal variance for each flow. Furthermore, we conduct extensive simulations on two open joint throughput-AoI optimization problems. In both cases, TSDM significantly outperforms existing scheduling policies.