Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular

Zhuoyi Zhao; Igor Kadota

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arXiv · 2605.13012

Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular

Zhuoyi Zhao·Igor Kadota

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Abstract

We consider a 5G cellular network where a gNB schedules time-sensitive uplink transmissions from multiple UEs and forwards received packets to remote destinations. In practical 5G networks, the gNB does not directly observe the destination-side Age of Information (AoI) and must make scheduling decisions under stringent slot-level runtime constraints. In this paper, we develop a low-complexity AoI-aware scheduling policy for 5G cellular under limited observability. We first design a low-complexity estimator that infers UE-side packet timestamps and destination-side AoI from gNB-visible observations. Based on these estimates, we propose and implement a Max-Weight policy (MW-LC) in NetSim, a 5G emulator with a standards-compatible protocol stack, to showcase its performance against baseline 5G scheduling policies. Furthermore, we use MATLAB simulations to show that the LC estimator and MW-LC achieve performance close to a richer estimator-based AoI policy from the literature. The estimator may be of independent interest to the community, enabling AoI-aware algorithms beyond 5G scheduling.

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Zhuoyi Zhao, Igor Kadota. 2026-05-13. Toward Practical Age-of-Information Scheduling in 5G Cellular. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13012

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