B-ICP: Backpressure Interest Control Protocol for Multipath Communication in NDN

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising communication paradigm to support content distribution for the Future Internet. The objective of this paper is to maximize the consumer downloading rate by retrieving content via multiple paths concurrently. This is supported by adaptive forwarding in NDN. The majority of solutions for selecting the forwarding interfaces do so based on latency. However, this can overload the low-latency paths quickly. This can occur as users reduce requesting rates based on congestion signals, from the low-latency paths. Hence, the high-latency paths are not fully utilized. This paper solves this problem by introducing Backpressure Interest Control Protocol (B-ICP). In B-ICP, routers estimate the forwarding capabilities of interfaces based on congestion signals and limit the forwarding rates to interfaces accordingly. Thus, B-ICP avoids congesting certain paths earlier than others, with the aim being evenly distributed path utilization. Simulation-based evaluations show that B-ICP improves throughput, converges to equilibriums quickly and supports the producers that join the network dynamically in comparison with existing solutions.