PTP: Path-specified transport protocol for concurrent multipath transmission in named data networks

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising Future Internet architecture to support content distribution. Its inherent addressless routing paradigm brings valuable characteristics to improve the transmission robustness and efficiency, e.g. users are enabled to download content from multiple providers concurrently. However, multipath transmission NDN is different from that in Multipath TCP, i.e. the “paths” in NDN are transparent to and uncontrollable by users. To this end, the user controls the traffic on all transmission paths as an entirety, which leads to a noticeable problem of low bandwidth utilization. In particular, the congestion of a certain path will trigger traffic reduction on other transmission paths that are underutilized. Some solutions have been proposed by letting routers balance loads of different paths to avoid congesting a certain path prematurely. However, the complexity of obtaining an optimal load balancing solution (i.e. solving a Multi-Commodity Flow problem) becomes higher with increasing network size, which limits universal NDN deployments.This paper introduces a compromise solution—Path-specified Transport Protocol (PTP). PTP supports both the label switching and the addressless routing schemes. Specifically, the label switching scheme allows users to precisely control the traffic on each transmission path, and the addressless routing scheme maintains the valuable feature of retrieving content from any provider to guarantee robustness. As the traffic on a transmission path can be explicitly controlled by consumers, load balancing is no longer needed in routers, which reduces the computational burden on routers and consequently increases the system scalability. The experimental results show that PTP significantly increases users’ downloading rates and improves network throughput.