Low Earth Orbit (LEO) megaconstellations are the first network in three decades being built greenfield at a planetary scale, and the window for shaping their architecture is closing. Once operators lock their inter-satellite and ground-gateway data planes to IP conventions, the field will have lost its last realistic opportunity to deploy a non-legacy inter-domain architecture without coordinating a billion endpoints. The terrestrial Internet has resisted architectural change for two decades, as IPv6 illustrates: standardized in 1998, it crossed 50% on Google's measurement only in 2026. Clean-slate designs such as ICN, SCION, and XIA, and extensibility frameworks such as the Trotsky Processor (TP) and Plutarch, have not yet broken this rigidity. We argue that non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), in synergy with 6G, offer the last realistic substrate for the long-anticipated revitalization of the Internet's architecture, and that TP is the most credible primary vehicle for that reboot, complemented at the edges by translation approaches. We sketch two concrete blueprints, with TP either native to the orbital segment ("Trotsky in the Sky") or anchored on the ground and using the NTN as a globe-spanning logical pipe between L3.5 nodes ("Trotsky in the Trenches"). A capacity analysis of the Starlink constellation shows that the V3 generation entering service in 2026 makes capacity a non-issue: fewer than 2K V3-class satellites would absorb today's entire yearly inter-domain traffic, well within the ≈10K currently in orbit.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite ISPs promise universal Internet connectivity, yet their interaction with content delivery remains poorly understood. We present the first comprehensive measurement study decomposing Starlink's web content delivery performance decomposed across Point of Presence (PoP), DNS, and CDN layers. Through two years of measurements combining 225K Cloudflare AIM tests, M-Lab data, and active probing from 99 RIPE Atlas and controlled Starlink probes, we collect 6.1M traceroutes and 10.8M DNS queries to quantify how satellite architecture disrupts terrestrial CDN assumptions. We identify three distinct performance regimes based on infrastructure density. Regions with local content-rich PoPs achieve near-terrestrial latencies with the satellite segment dominating 80-90% of RTT. Infrastructure-sparse regions suffer cascading penalties: remote PoPs force distant resolver selection, which triggers CDN mis-localization, pushing latencies beyond 200 ms. Dense-infrastructure regions show minimal sensitivity to PoP changes. Leveraging Starlink's infrastructure expansion in early 2025 as a natural experiment, we demonstrate that relocating PoPs closer to user location reduces median page-fetch times by 60%. Our findings reveal that infrastructure proximity, not satellite coverage, influences web performance, requiring fundamental changes to CDN mapping and DNS resolution for satellite ISPs.

We present the age control protocol ACP$+$, a transport layer protocol that regulates the rate at which update packets carrying information from a source are sent over the Internet to a monitor. The source would like to minimize the average age of information at the monitor. Extensive experimentation helps 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. Surprisingly, age minimizing rates over fast Internet paths are about 0.5 Mbps, which is a small fraction, for example, of link rates supported by WiFi wireless access technology. We also show that congestion control algorithms employed by 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.

QUIC was launched in 2013 with a goal to provide reliable, connection-oriented and end-to-end encrypted transport and is recently standardized in May 2021 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This work evaluates QUIC performance over the web, cloud storage, and video workloads and compares them to traditional TLS/TCP. To this end, we have designed tests (quic_perf,tls_perfandvideo) and conducted measurements from 2018 – 2021 using multiple vantage points: an educational network, a high-bandwidth low-RTT residential link in Germany and a low-bandwidth high-RTT residential link in India. We target Alexa Top-1M for web workloads and probe them towards the support for QUIC, TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. By measuring$\lt 5.7$K websites that support QUIC, we observe that QUIC has up to$\approx 140$% lower mean connection times than TLS 1.2/1.3 over TCP for low-bandwidth and high-RTT networks. When comparing different versions of QUIC, we observe that IETF QUIC connection times are slightly better than different versions (Q050,Q046,Q044,Q043,Q039andQ035) of gQUIC. For cloud storage workloads, we observe that TLS 1.2 over TCP exhibits higher throughput for larger file sizes (>20 MB up to 2 GB), while QUIC exhibits higher throughput for smaller file sizes ($\leq 20$MB) while downloading files from Google Drive. At the same time, QUIC has much higher CPU utilization than TLS 1.2 over TCP, almost double while downloading a large file (200 MB) from Google Drive due to in-kernel optimizations that benefit TCP. For video workloads, we observe that QUIC is 534 ms faster than TLS 1.2 over TCP from India (406 ms from Germany) in establishing a connection to YouTube media servers. Although we witness that (similar to cloud storage workloads) the overall download rate is higher over TLS, QUIC still tends to depict better video content delivery with reduced stall events and up to 50% lower stall durations due to its lower latency overheads. To support reproducibility, the developed tests and the collected data are made publicly available to the community.

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) extends traditional TCP to enable simultaneous use of multiple connection endpoints at the source and destination. MPTCP has been under active development since its standardization in 2013, and more recently in February 2020, MPTCP was upstreamed to the Linux kernel. In this paper, we provide the first broad analysis of MPTCPv0 in the Internet. We probe the entire IPv4 address space and an IPv6 hitlist to detect MPTCP-enabled systems operational on port 80 and 443. Our scans reveal a steady increase in MPTCP-capable IPs, reaching 9k+ on IPv4 and a few dozen on IPv6. We also discover a significant share of seemingly MPTCP-capable hosts, an artifact of middleboxes mirroring TCP options. We conduct targeted HTTP(S) measurements towards select hosts and find that middleboxes can aggressively impact the perceived quality of applications utilizing MPTCP. Finally, we analyze two complementary traffic traces from CAIDA and MAWI to shed light on the real-world usage of MPTCP. We find that while MPTCP usage has increased by a factor of 20 over the past few years, its traffic share is still quite low.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications have sources sense and send their measurement updates over the Internet to a monitor (control station) for real-time monitoring and actuation. Ideally, these updates would be delivered fresh, at a high rate constrained only by the supported sensing rate. However, such a rate may lead to network congestion related delays in delivery of updates at the monitor that make the freshest update at the monitor unacceptably old for the application. Alternately, at low rates, while updates arrive at the monitor with smaller delays, new updates arrive infrequently. Thus, both low and high rates may lead to an undesirably aged freshest update at the monitor. We propose a novel transport layer protocol, namely the Age Control Protocol (ACP), which enables timely delivery of such updates to monitors over the Internet in a network-transparent manner. ACP adapts the rate of updates from a source such that the average age of updates at the monitor is minimized. We detail the protocol and the proposed control algorithm. We demonstrate its efficacy using extensive simulations and realworld experiments, including wireless access for the sources and an end-to-end connection with multiple hops to the monitor.

Edge clouds are an attractive platform to support latency-sensitive applications by providing computations on servers deployed close to end-users. These servers aim to employ MPTCP to leverage multiple connections including wireless over a public network. In this paper, we show that the default MPTCP design does not adequately support reliability in these environments, which makes it unfit for use in edge clouds. We propose RAMPTCP, an extension to MPTCP which focuses on adding reliability over network paths.

Real-time monitoring is characterized by a source repeatedly sending updates over the Internet to a monitor, which desires the sensed information at it to be as fresh (of small age) as possible, given network constraints. We propose the Age Control Protocol (ACP), which, in a network-transparent manner, enables a source to keep the age at the monitor small. We evaluate it using simulations and real-world experiments.