Implementation and Evaluation of Age-Aware Downlink Scheduling Policies in Push-Based and Pull-Based Communication

As communication systems evolve to better cater to the needs of machine-type applications such as remote monitoring and networked control, advanced perspectives are required for the design of link layer protocols. The age of information (AoI) metric has firmly taken its place in the literature as a metric and tool to measure and control the data freshness demands of various applications. AoI measures the timeliness of transferred information from the point of view of the destination. In this study, we experimentally investigate AoI of multiple packet flows on a wireless multi-user link consisting of a transmitter (base station) and several receivers, implemented using software-defined radios (SDRs). We examine the performance of various scheduling policies under push-based and pull-based communication scenarios. For the push-based communication scenario, we implement age-aware scheduling policies from the literature and compare their performance with those of conventional scheduling methods. Then, we investigate the query age of information (QAoI) metric, an adaptation of the AoI concept for pull-based scenarios. We modify the former age-aware policies to propose variants that have a QAoI minimization objective. We share experimental results obtained in a simulation environment as well as on the SDR testbed.