A3L-FEC:
Age-Aware Application Layer Forward Error Correction
A UDP-based age-aware flow-control protocol for fresh, timely, and reliable status updates — bridging Age of Information (AoI) theory and real-world networking.
Reliability and throughput are not enough
For time-sensitive systems, conventional metrics such as throughput and average delay do not capture what matters most: freshness. A link can be fast and reliable yet still deliver stale information. A³L-FEC targets the Age of Information (AoI) directly — minimizing the rate of age violations, the events where the age of the freshest received update exceeds an application-defined threshold.
An age-aware control loop over UDP
A³L-FEC is an application-layer packet-generation and flow-control mechanism running on top of UDP. It injects just enough redundancy to keep updates fresh — "keeping the pipe just full, but no fuller" — and adapts its decisions to varying network conditions.
Optimizes freshness
Controls peak age of the end-to-end flow to reduce age violations, rather than maximizing raw throughput.
Packet-level FEC
Each sample is split into k chunks and coded into n using an MDS code; any k of n chunks reconstruct it — no retransmissions.
Receiver-driven feedback
The receiver estimates delay and age violations and feeds back rate decisions, using memory of past behaviour for stable, adaptive control.
One core mechanism, two operating modes
A3L-FEC-FSFB
Fixed Sampling rate, Fixed Block-length. A simpler baseline that selects which recent samples to transmit using an optimal stationary policy, with receiver-driven rate control.
Learn about FSFB →A3L-FEC-VSVB
Variable Sampling, Variable Block-length. A "generate-at-will" adaptive version that tunes sampling interval and coding rate in real time for dynamic, delay-tolerant networks.
Learn about VSVB →Reported results indicate fewer age violations
Evaluations in Mininet-WiFi and MATLAB (with ns-3 used to benchmark TCP variants) indicate that A³L-FEC reduces age violations compared to two related protocols in the literature — TCP-BBR and ACP+ — while keeping packet delay close to the link's propagation delay.
- Lower age violation rate across tested configurations
- Reduced average AoI versus fixed-rate TCP-BBR
- Stable, low packet delay via a fire-and-forget UDP design
Protected by an international PCT patent application
"An age-aware forward error correction based method for adjusting the transmission rate" — a method that adjusts transmission rate using feedback from mean delay and Age of Information parameters, balancing sampling rate and data redundancy.
- Assignee
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (METU)
- Inventors
- Sajjad Baghaee (Alper Alioğlu) · Baran Tan Bacınoğlu · Elif Uysal · Mahdi Shakiba Herfeh
- Priority / Filing
- 2024-02-12 · 2025-02-04
Build on age-aware networking
For research collaboration, implementation questions, or citation requests, get in touch with the team.