Jointly Optimal Congestion Control, Forwarding Strategy and Power Control for Named-Data Multihop Wireless Network

Named data networking (NDN) as a promising future network architecture has been widely considered as a very appropriate network protocol for multihop wireless network (MWN). In named-data MWN, congestion control, forwarding strategy, and power control are three coupled critical issues. There are already extensive works about cross-layer design for MWN with IP and they have demonstrated the advantage of cross-layer design. Enlightened by cross-layer designs for MWN with IP, in this paper, the joint congestion control, forwarding strategy, and power control problem for named-data MWN are studied, and it is modeled as a named-data network utility maximization (NDNUM) problem. In our NDNUM, we maximize data receiving rate related network utility minus power consumption, while consider NDN's communication characteristics that are different from IP. Then a distributed iterative algorithm based on subgradient method is proposed in order to solve NDNUM. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first cross-layer design for congestion control and power control for named-data MWN. We show that network utility maximization not only can be used to facilitate cross-layer design for networks with end-to-end protocols but also can be used to design cross-layer mechanisms for information-centric network. From simulation, our algorithm outperforms existing congestion control mechanism in network throughput, resource utilization efficiency, and stabilization PIT size.