A Rate-based Multipath-aware Congestion Control Mechanism in Named Data Networking

In Named Data Networking (NDN), content can be retrieved from multiple sources through multiple path, which makes the traditional end-to-end congestion control mechanisms unsuitable for NDN. A lot of works have been done to achieve the congestion control by limiting the transmission rate of interest packets, but most of them overlooked the intelligent forwarding feature in NDN. In this paper, we propose a rate-based, multipath-aware congestion control algorithm MNRCP, which is inspired by Rate Control Protocol (RCP). MNRCP calculates the transmission rate for every flow and feedbacks it to the consumer to control the sending rate of interest packets. In order to fully exploit the features of multiple data sources, in-network caching and multipath forwarding and adapt to the practical scenarios that interest packets requesting the same data can arrive from different interfaces, we propose a novel multipath forwarding strategy and a multipath feedback mechanism to achieve fairness and network utilization. In addition, simulation results of our algorithm in ndnSIM2.3 show that compared with other congestion control mechanisms, MNRCP can achieve higher total throughput while ensuring fairness. According to the available bandwidth of the path, MNRCP also can achieve the optimal traffic split ratio, and thus performs better in load balancing.