Recursive Optimization of Finite Blocklength Allocation to Mitigate Age-of-Information Outage

As an emerging metric for the timeliness of information delivery, Age-of-Information (AoI) raises a special interest in the research area of tolerance-critical communications, wherein sufficiently short blocklength is usually adopted as an essential requirement. However, the interplay between AoI and finite blocklength is scantly treated. This paper studies the occurrence of critically high AoI, i.e., AoI outage, in generic orthogonal multi-access (OMA) systems with respect to the blocklength allocation among users. A Markov Decision Process model is set up for the problem, which enables a static state analysis. Therewith a recursive optimizer to reduce AoI outage is proposed, and further enhanced by heuristic penalty functions. The burstiness of AoI outage is also analyzed to provide additional insights into this problem in the finite blocklength (FBL) regime. It is shown that, different from average AoI optimizations, a risk-sensitive approach is significantly beneficial for AoI outage optimizations, on account of the FBL regime.