In this paper, we study the moments of the Age of Information (AoI) for both active and passive users in a random access network. In this network, active users broadcast sensing data, while passive users detect in-band radio activities from out-of-network devices, such as jammers. Collisions occur when multiple active users transmit simultaneously. Passive users can detect radio activities only when no active user transmits. Each active user’s transmission behavior follows a Markov process. We aim to minimize the weighted sum of any moments of AoI for both user types. To achieve this, we employ a second-order analysis of system behavior. Specifically, we characterize an active user’s transmission Markov process using its mean and temporal variance. We show that any moment of the AoI can be approximated by a function of these two parameters. This insight enables us to analyze and optimize the transmission Markov process for active users. We apply this strategy to two different random access models. Simulation results show that policies derived from this strategy outperform other baseline policies.

This paper studies an online service caching problem, where an edge server, equipped with a prediction window of future service request arrivals, needs to decide which services to host locally subject to limited storage capacity. The edge server aims to minimize the sum of a request forwarding cost (i.e., the cost of forwarding requests to remote data centers to process) and a service instantiating cost (i.e., that of retrieving and setting up a service). Considering request patterns are usually non-stationary in practice, the performance of the edge server is measured by dynamic regret, which compares the total cost with that of the dynamic optimal offline solution. To solve the problem, we propose a randomized online algorithm with low complexity and theoretically derive an upper bound on its expected dynamic regret. Simulation results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art policies in terms of the runtime and expected total cost.

In this paper, we address the optimization problem of moments of Age of Information (AoI) for active and passive users in a random access network. In this network, active users broadcast sensing data while passive users only receive signals. Collisions occur when multiple active users transmit simultaneously, and passive users are unable to receive signals while any active user is transmitting. Each active user follows a Markov process for their transmissions. We aim to minimize the weighted sum of any moments of AoI for both active and passive users in this network. To achieve this, we employ a second-order analysis to analyze the system. Specifically, we characterize an active user’s transmission Markov process by its mean and temporal process. We show that any moment of the AoI can be expressed a function of the mean and temporal variance, which, in turn, enables us to derive the optimal transmission Markov process. Our simulation results demonstrate that this proposed strategy outperforms other baseline policies that use different active user transmission models.

This paper studies a problem of jointly optimizing two important operations in mobile edge computing without knowing future requests, namely service caching, which deter-mines which services to be hosted at the edge, and service routing, which determines which requests to be processed locally at the edge. We aim to address several practical challenges, including limited storage and computation capacities of edge servers and unknown future request arrival patterns. To this end, we formulate the problem as an online optimization problem, in which the objective function includes costs of forwarding requests, processing requests, and reconfiguring edge servers. By leveraging a natural timescale separation between service routing and service caching, namely, the former happens faster than the latter, we propose an online two-stage algorithm and its randomized variant. Both algorithms have low complexity, and our fractional solution achieves sublinear regret. Simulation results show that our algorithms significantly outperform other state-of-the-art online policies.