Worse Routes, Fresher Information: Preemption Redefines Which Route is Best
Abstract
This paper studies joint sampling, route activation, and preemption control over N heterogeneous transmission routes under a long-run objective combining Age of Information (AoI) with sampling and transmission costs. We formulate the problem as an average-cost impulse-control model, derive a vector-form integral average-cost optimality equation over a hybrid state space, and establish structural reductions on the state. We consider a two-route case and compute optimized policies using discretized policy iteration. Surprisingly, the results show that preemption can reverse routing preferences: the optimized policy may exclusively use a route with both a larger mean delay and a larger delay variance while avoiding the seemingly superior route. Relative to baselines that do not allow preemption, the proposed policy reduces average AoI by up to 96%.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{atasayar2026worse,
title = {{Worse Routes, Fresher Information: Preemption Redefines Which Route is Best}},
author = {Adem Utku Atasayar and Aimin Li and Elif Uysal},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.13622},
eprint = {2609.13622},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13622},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Worse Routes, Fresher Information: Preemption Redefines Which Route is Best
AU - Adem Utku Atasayar
AU - Aimin Li
AU - Elif Uysal
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.13622
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13622
AB - This paper studies joint sampling, route activation, and preemption control over N heterogeneous transmission routes under a long-run objective combining Age of Information (AoI) with sampling and transmission costs. We formulate the problem as an average-cost impulse-control model, derive a vector-form integral average-cost optimality equation over a hybrid state space, and establish structural reductions on the state. We consider a two-route case and compute optimized policies using discretized policy iteration. Surprisingly, the results show that preemption can reverse routing preferences: the optimized policy may exclusively use a route with both a larger mean delay and a larger delay variance while avoiding the seemingly superior route. Relative to baselines that do not allow preemption, the proposed policy reduces average AoI by up to 96%.
ER -