IS: interest set to enhance flow transmission in named-data networking

Named-data Networking (NDN) is a promising future Internet architecture, which introduces some evolutionary elements into layer-3, e.g., consumer-driven communication, soft state on data forwarding plane and hop-byhop traffic control. And those elements ensure data holders to solely return the requested data within the lifetime of the request, instead of pushing data whenever needed and whatever it is. Despite the dispute on the advantages and their prices, this pattern requires data consumers to keep sending requests at the right moments for continuous data transmission, resulting in significant forwarding cost and sophisticated application design. In this paper, we propose Interest Set (IS) mechanism, which compresses a set of similar Interests into one request, and maintains a relative long-term data returning path with soft state and continuous feedback from upstream. In this way, IS relaxes the above requirement, and scales NDN data forwarding by reducing forwarded requests and soft states that are needed to retrieve a given set of data.