AM-IF: Adaptive Multi-Path Interest Forwarding in named data networking

Abstract

Named data networking (NDN) have been proposed as a new solution to overcome the limitation of TCP/IP architecture. In the proposed designs, researchers have not paid enough attention to the concept of forwarding strategy in NDN, which is a crucial part of this method. An efficient forwarding strategy is essential to maximize the benefits of multiple concurrent connections. To fill this gap, an innovative forwarding strategy called Adaptive Multi-Path Interest Forwarding (AM-IF) strategy is presented in this paper. In the proposed strategy, when a router receives an Interest packet, it checks if there is a sufficient number of paths to the requested content on servers or cache of routers. In case of a lack of enough paths for the Interest packet, AM-IF explores new paths by redirecting the Interest request through all ports of the neighbor routers, and data regarding the detected paths are collected. This data enables AM-IF to identify and select the best paths by computing the degrees of all discovered paths based on the paths’ delay, available bandwidth, and disjointness. After the selecting of the best-detected path, the process of transferring data across multiple paths is started where the quota of each path depends on the efficiency of these paths. In the proposed strategy, less load is allocated to congested paths by monitoring the status of paths. By comparing the proposed strategy with other strategies using the simulation results extracted from ndnSIM, we can conclude that our approach performs better in delivering the content. The proposed strategy improves parameters such as network load balancing, average throughput, average packet drop, average Interest Satisfaction Ratio, and average content retrieval time at a reasonable computational cost.