SAOITHE: Sustainable Age-of-Information-Based Timely Status Updating for Hardware-constrained Edge networks

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the joint optimization of information timeliness and environmental sustainability in 6G and future large-scale edge networks by incorporating time-varying carbon intensity into the Age of Information (AoI) optimization framework for the first time. The authors formulate a carbon-aware status update model that adheres to constraints on carbon footprint budgets, transmission duty cycles, and channel capacity. This constrained optimization problem is cast as a constrained Markov decision process, and the paper proposes SAOITHE, a scalable real-time scheduling algorithm based on the Whittle index. Experimental results demonstrate that SAOITHE reduces AoI by approximately 25%, 20%, and 75% in low-, medium-, and high-carbon-intensity regions, respectively, while strictly satisfying carbon budget constraints, significantly outperforming existing approaches.

Abstract

In future large-scale deployments of 6G and beyond networks, collecting timely information, as measured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric, is becoming increasingly important. At the same time, the environmental impact, often characterized by the resulting Carbon Footprint (CF), depends on both the amount of consumed energy and the Carbon Intensity (CI), i.e., the amount of CO$_2$-equivalent emissions produced per unit of consumed energy. Since CI varies over time, minimizing energy is not equivalent to minimizing CF, as a status update with the same energy demand may result in a different carbon cost depending on when it is transmitted. This makes timely status updating a nontrivial scheduling problem. To address this challenge, we formulate carbon-aware status updating as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP) that minimizes AoI subject to CF budget, transmission duty-cycle, and channel-capacity constraints. We then propose Sustainable Age-of-Information-Based Timely Status Updating for Hardware-constrained Edge networks (SAOITHE), a Whittle-index-based scheduling solution that enables scalable real-time scheduling. Using real-world CI traces across low-, medium-, and high-CI regions, the results show that SAOITHE remains within the allocated CF budget while achieving lower AoI than baseline policies. Moreover, the gains are around 25% and 20% in low- and medium-CI regions, respectively, and up to 75% in high-CI settings, while preserving scalability.

Problem

• Age of Information
• Carbon Footprint
• Edge networks
• Status updating
• Sustainability

Innovation

• Age of Information
• Carbon Footprint
• Whittle Index
• Constrained MDP
• Edge Networks