A Responsibility-based Transport Control for Named Data Networking

Abstract

Transport Control in Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is a challenging task. The lack of end-to-end communications in this architecture makes traditional, timeout-driven transport control schemes inefficient and wasteful. Hop-by-hop transport control is an alternative solution to tackle this problem that because of the stateful forwarding plan of NDN can be applied more easily than the IP networks. Most existing solutions in this direction assume known link bandwidths and Data packet sizes or require a loop-free multipath forwarding strategy to work well, but these assumptions do not always hold true and there exist no a loop-free multipath forwarding strategy among the existing forwarding strategies for NDN. In this paper, a Responsibility-based Transport Control (RTC) protocol for NDN is proposed. This protocol does not make strong assumptions about the network and avoids looping paths by applying a window-based rate control mechanism and a capacity-aware, multipath forwarding strategy in each face. In RTC, routers maintain a congestion window in each face and decide on accepting or refusing to take responsibility for forwarding of a newly received Interest packet through exchanging three new control packets. These control packets provide reliable information for managing the congestion windows and capacity-aware traffic splitting in routers. They also enable diverse deployment scenarios for NDN such as IP-overly and wireless links. The RTC is implemented in ndnSIM and its capability in managing congestion, achieving high throughput and providing flow fairness are demonstrated through extensive simulations.