ACP+: An Age Control Protocol for the Internet

TL;DR

This paper introduces ACP+, a novel transport layer protocol designed to minimize the age of information at a monitor by regulating update packet rates over the Internet, with extensive experiments analyzing its effectiveness.

Contribution

The paper presents ACP+, a new age control protocol that addresses limitations of traditional congestion control algorithms for maintaining fresh information.

Findings

Many existing TCP congestion control algorithms are unsuitable for age control.

ACP+ effectively reduces the average age of information under various network conditions.

Experimental results demonstrate ACP+'s superiority in age minimization over traditional methods.

Abstract

We present ACP+, an age control protocol, which is a transport layer protocol that regulates the rate at which update packets from a source are sent over the Internet to a monitor. The source would like to keep the average age of sensed information at the monitor to a minimum, given the network conditions. Extensive experimentation helps us shed light on age control over the current Internet and its implications for sources sending updates over a shared wireless access to monitors in the cloud. We also show that many congestion control algorithms proposed over the years for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), including hybrid approaches that achieve higher throughputs at lower delays than traditional loss-based congestion control, are unsuitable for age control.