Minimizing AoI in Mobile Edge Computing: Nested Index Policy with Preemptive and Non-preemptive Structure

Abstract: Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) leverages computational heterogeneity between mobile devices and edge nodes to enable real-time applications requiring high information freshness. The Age-of-Information (AoI) metric serves as a crucial evaluator of information timeliness in such systems. Addressing AoI minimization in multi-user MEC environments presents significant challenges due to stochastic computing times. In this paper, we consider multiple users offloading tasks to heterogeneous edge servers in an MEC system, focusing on preemptive and non-preemptive task scheduling mechanisms. The problem is first reformulated as a Restless Multi-Arm Bandit (RMAB) problem, with a multi-layer Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework established to characterize AoI dynamics in the MEC system. Based on the multi-layer MDP, we propose a nested index framework and design a nested index policy with provably asymptotic optimality. This establishes a theoretical framework adaptable to various scheduling mechanisms, achieving efficient optimization through state stratification and index design in both preemptive and non-preemptive modes. Finally, the closed-form of the nested index is derived, facilitating performance trade-offs between computational complexity and accuracy while ensuring the universal applicability of the nested index policy across both scheduling modes. The experimental results show that in non-preemptive scheduling, compared with the benchmark method, the optimality gap is reduced by 25.43%, while in preemptive scheduling, the gap has reduced by 61.84%. As the system scale increases, it asymptotically converges in two scheduling modes and especially provides near-optimal performance in non-preemptive structure.