Concurrent Multipath Routing Optimization in Named Data Networks

To achieve maximum throughput in named data networking (NDN) with consideration of fairness among each source-sink pair, we model the routing problem in NDN as a mixed-integer maximum concurrent flow problem. Taking advantage of the smart forwarding framework in NDN, we obtain an approximate optimal routing and forwarding solution with our improved Fleischer and random rounding (FRR) algorithm. We analyze the complexity of the Fleischer algorithm more comprehensively and give the best scaling method to achieve the least iterations. In addition, we further reduce the complexity of the Fleischer algorithm so that it iterates only once, thus getting a heuristic algorithm which is called multicommodity multipath (MCMP). Using ndnSIM-based simulation, we compare our proposed routing algorithms with the existing routing algorithms, including flooding, k-shortest path, and best single path routing, and the simulation results prove that FRR and MCMP can outperform other algorithms both in throughput and latency, and it can also be concluded that the best number of paths for k-shortest path routing should be close to and less than the average node degree of the network. For studying routing optimization with caching, we conduct simulations with different in-network cache capacity and different caching policies. The simulation results show that although the LRU can achieve the best performance under the same cache capacity, the cache capacity plays a decisive role. All routing algorithms produce better performance with caching, but the FRR still achieves the best performance, and follows by MCMP.