Age of Information based cache updating with popularity contents: Whittle’s index based approach

We focus on the scheduling algorithm for updating files from a cloud server to a local server having cache. We consider that only K out of N files can be updated at each timeslot. Each file is time-sensitive and the content relevance is thus measured through the Age of Information. In addition, each file has its own popularity which is time-varying according to a Markovian model. In this paper, we offer two contributions: first, we exhibit Whittle’s index for this scheduling problem when the popularity is known and fixed over time. Second, we propose a heuristic based on previous Whittle’s index for the time-varying popularity case assuming that only the past popularity is available.