Network-assisted congestion control for information centric networking

Internet has grown very rapidly in the last couple of decades and still growing because of the expansion and utilization of various services and applications. Consequently, demand of delay and throughput sensitive services, like audio/video is also increasing. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is proposed as an architecture for the future Internet to meet the modern users and application requirements. In ICN users send requests (Interest Packets) for the Data they need. Interest packet is assigned a lifetime, which greatly affects the Quality of Experience (QoE) because user needs to resend the Interest, when the lifetime expires. Interest lifetime may be expired because of congestion, or Interest lifetime is shorter than the network delay, etc. Waiting for the expiration of an Interest lifetime to resend it is merely appropriate for best effort traffic, rather than services which require high throughput and are delay sensitive. In this paper, we propose Network-Assisted Congestion Control mechanism in ICN, which detects the congestion before it happens, and provides notification to downstream node. On reception of the notification, downstream node continuously reduces the traffic rate. However, when the downstream node fails to adjust the sending rate, the same procedure continues, until the sending node reduces the traffic rate through adjusting its congestion window. We have intensively evaluated our proposal by comparing it with similar proposal using ndnSIM. The experimental results show that our proposal achieves up to 59 percent performance improvement over other proposal in the literature.