Network Codes-based Multi-Source Transmission Control Protocol for Content-centric Networks

With the rapid shift from end-to-end communications to content-based data retrieval, there are increasing interests in exploiting Content-centric Networks (CCN) to deliver data. As the special characteristics of CCN, in-network caching and naming-based routing make traditional TCP-like transmission control protocol unsuitable. Although there are some existing efforts on improving the congestion control in CCN, the big issue of redundant transmissions caused by multiple sources has received little attention. To eliminate the redundancy and speed up the transmission, we propose a complete Network Codes-based Multi-Source Transmission Control Protocol (MSTCP), which provides an efficient and controllable multi-source content retrieval service over CCN. MSTCP takes advantage of random network coding to make full use of the coded data responded by different sources to speed up decoding and data receiving at the request side. Moreover, we design a scheduling algorithm based on a simple Expected Reception Deadline (ERD) to efficiently control the number of coded packets to send at each source. This not only effectively eliminates the redundant transmissions in CCN, but also helps to significantly speed up the information retrieval. Extensive simulations show that our mechanism greatly reduces the redundancy while speeding up the content retrievals by the network users.