An explicit congestion control algorithm for Named Data Networking

As a typical information-centric networking architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) has attracted wide research attentions in recent years. Since NDN transport has new features of multi-source and multi-path, the implicit congestion detection mechanism of the traditional TCP protocol based on a single source and a single path is no longer suitable for NDN. In this paper, we propose a novel NDN congestion control algorithm based on explicit congestion feedback - ECP (Explicit Control Protocol). It detects the network congestion status proactively by monitoring the length of outgoing Interest queue at the intermediate nodes, and sends explicit feedback to the receiver. The receiver then correspondingly adjusts the sending rate of Interests to control the returning rate of Data, thus realizing the congestion control of the network. Simulation results based on ndnSIM show that ECP performs better in terms of throughput and application delay compared with implicit congestion control algorithms.