We consider the design of distributed scheduling algorithms that minimize age of information in single-hop wireless networks. The centralized max-weight policy is known to be nearly optimal in this setting; hence, our goal is to design a distributed CSMA scheme that can mimic its performance. To that end, we propose a distributed protocol called Fresh-CSMA and show that in an idealized setting, Fresh-CSMA can match the scheduling decisions of the max-weight policy with high probability in each frame, and also match the theoretical performance guarantees of the max-weight policy over the entire time horizon. We then consider a more realistic setting and study the impact of protocol parameters on the probability of collisions and the overhead caused by the distributed nature of the protocol. We also consider the monitoring of Markov sources and extend our approach to CSMA protocols that incorporate Age of Incorrect Information (AoII) instead of AoI. Finally, we provide simulations that support our theoretical results and show that the performance gap between the ideal and realistic versions of Fresh-CSMA is small.

翻译：我们考虑在单跳无线网络中设计最小化信息年龄的分布式调度算法。已知集中式最大权重策略在该场景下接近最优；因此，我们的目标是设计一种能够模仿其性能的分布式CSMA方案。为此，我们提出了一种名为Fresh-CSMA的分布式协议，并证明在理想化设置中，Fresh-CSMA在每个帧内能够以高概率匹配最大权重策略的调度决策，并在整个时间范围内匹配最大权重策略的理论性能保证。随后，我们考虑更实际的设置，研究协议参数对碰撞概率以及分布式协议特性所导致的额外开销的影响。我们还针对马尔可夫源的监测场景，将我们的方法扩展到采用错误信息年龄（AoII）而非信息年龄（AoI）的CSMA协议。最后，我们提供仿真实验来支持理论结果，并表明理想版本与实用版本的Fresh-CSMA之间的性能差距较小。