3CP: Coordinated Congestion Control Protocol for Named-Data Networking

Abstract

Congestion control has a vital role in the prosperity of any network. Thus, designing an effective mechanism for congestion control of the NDN is an active research area. In NDN, congestion control and interest forwarding mechanisms are usually considered an integrated plane for the network traffic management. In this paper, we propose to decouple the forwarding and congestion control planes. We offer a novel architecture for the NDN router in which congestion control and forwarding modules cooperate for interest flow management and congestion control. Based on this framework, we introduce a new explicit feedback-based congestion control protocol (3CP) for managing the consumers’ sending rate in an NDN environment that multi-source and multi-path content delivery is intrinsically supported. 3CP employs a new per-packet feedback computation to inform consumers from the available resource of paths toward repositories. Also, it provides feedback to the forwarding mechanism of a router for adjusting the sending rate of interest packets to each interface. By interest flow management, 3CP controls the traffic of data packets in the network. As a significant achievement, 3CP prevents multi-path flows from acquiring more network resources and could manage fair resource allocation to the flows in each path, whereas the consumers obtain the same throughput. The packet-level simulation was conducted by an NDN simulator, and the results confirmed that 3CP outperforms the existing multi-source/multi-path congestion control mechanisms in NDN.