ACP+: An Age Control Protocol for the Internet

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.