ACN was initially designed to be layered on top of UDP/IP and therefore will run over most IP transports including standard, inexpensive Ethernet and 802.11 (Wi-Fi) networks.
For example, DMP has been operated over TCP as well as over SDT as defined in the initial standard, DDL has been adapted with little change to describe devices accessed by DMX512 (ANSI E1.31/Streaming ACN), and several interoperability profiles have seen major revision or replacement without disturbing the other parts of the standard.
The reliability mechanism also provides online status so a component will detect when a connection is broken.
SDT provides a high degree of fine tuning over the trade-off between latency, reliability levels and resource requirements and availability of large numbers of concurrent sessions means they are a powerful tool for grouping and managing components whose functions are related or whose communication requirements are similar.
To avoid the inefficiencies of polling, in addition to simply reading property values (using a Get-Property message) DMP provides a subscription mechanism whereby a device will asynchronously send event messages to all subscribed controllers when the value of a property changes.
Interoperability profiles (EPIs) are provided in ANSI E1.17 for initial service discovery in a system; for allocation of multicast addresses when used on UDP and IPv4; for UDP port allocation when multicasting, for IP address assignment in conformant systems, for protocol timeouts in specific environments and so on.
This has been ported to a wide range of platforms, but it is limited in its scope and does not implement any DDL support.
An full implementation entitled Acacian[5] in C, which includes parsing of DDL descriptions to generate DMP structures was released under the Mozilla Public Licence in 2014 E1.31 (Streaming DMX over ACN) is supported on Linux (ARM, i386, x86-64) and Macintosh (PowerPC; i386, x86-64) by the Open Lighting Architecture.