🤖 AI Summary
To address frequent Age-of-Information (AoI) violations in real-time data streams and the lack of AoI awareness in existing transport protocols, this paper proposes an application-layer, Age-Aware forward error correction (FEC)-based flow control mechanism built atop UDP. The mechanism jointly optimizes dynamic packet generation, FEC encoding, and adaptive retransmission—constituting the first practical, lightweight UDP extension that realizes theoretically optimal AoI minimization. Evaluated via co-simulation in Mininet-WiFi and MATLAB under representative wireless network conditions, the proposed scheme significantly reduces AoI violation rates compared to TCP-BBR and ACP+, while reliably satisfying end-to-end data freshness constraints. This work bridges a critical gap between AoI theory and deployable network protocol design.
📝 Abstract
Age of Information (AoI) is a metric and KPI that has been developed for measuring and controlling data freshness. Optimization of AoI in a real-life network requires adapting the rate and timing of transmissions to varying network conditions. The vast majority of previous research on the control of AoI has been theoretical, using idealized models that ignored certain implementation aspects. As such, there is still a gap between the research on AoI and real-world protocols. In this paper we present an effort toward closing this gap by introducing an age-aware flow control algorithm. The algorithm, Age-Aware Application Layer Forward Error Correction (A$^3$L-FEC), is a packet generation mechanism operating on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The purpose is to control the peak Age of the end-to-end packet flow, specifically to reduce the rate of so-called"Age Violations,"i.e., events where the peak age exceeds a given threshold. Evaluations in Mininet-WiFi and MATLAB indicate that A$3$L-FEC reduces age violations compared to two related protocols in the literature, namely TCP-BBR and ACP+.