How Useful is Delayed Feedback in AoI Minimization — A Study on Systems with Queues in Both Forward and Backward Directions

One canonical example of Age-Of-Information (AoI) minimization is the update-through-queues models. Existing results fall into two categories: The open-loop setting for which the sender is oblivious of the actual packet departure time, versus the closed-loop setting for which the decision is based on instantaneous Acknowledgement (ACK). Neither setting perfectly reflects modern networked systems, which almost always rely on feedback that experiences some delay. Motivated by this observation, this work subjects the ACK traffic to an independent queue so that the closed-loop decision is made based on delayed feedback. Near-optimal schedulers have been devised, which smoothly transition from the instantaneous-ACK to the openloop schemes depending on how long the feedback delay is. The results thus quantify the benefits of delayed feedback for AoI minimization in the update-through-queues systems.