ICP: Design and evaluation of an Interest control protocol for content-centric networking

Content-centric networking (CCN) brings a paradigm shift in the present Internet communication model by addressing named-data instead of host locations. With respect to TCP/IP, the transport model is connectionless with a unique endpoint at the receiver, driving a retrieval process natively point to multi-point. Another salient feature of CCN is the possibility to embed storage capabilities into the network, adding a new dimension to the transport problem. The focus of this work is on the design of a receiver-driven Interest control protocol for CCN, whose definition, to the best of our knowledge, still lacks in literature. ICP realizes a window-based Interest flow control, achieving full efficiency and fairness under proper parameters setting. In this paper, we provide an analytical characterization of average rate, expected data transfer delay and queue dynamics in steady state on a single and multi-bottleneck network topology. Our model accounts for the impact of on-path caches. Protocol performance is also assessed via packet-level simulations and design guidelines are drawn from previous analysis.