Worse Routes, Fresher Information: Preemption Redefines Which Route is Best

arXiv:2609.13622v2 Announce Type: replace 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 $96\%$.