An Improved Maximum Flow Routing Algorithm for Multi-Homing in Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) separates the identifier and address of the host, which enables the multi-homed host to own multiple addresses. The packet carrying multiple destination addresses could obtain multiple output ports after matching the routing table. Therefore, in order to select the best output port for the packet with multiple destination addresses, the router needs to maintain a status table to record the dynamic status values of different ports. Since the status table directs the forwarding of the flow, the accuracy of the status value is crucial to the performance of the transmission. In the paper, we propose an improved maximum flow routing algorithm to calculate the status value of the status table to improve the efficiency of the transmission. The proposed algorithm utilizes the dynamic network information to maximize the transmission rate of the flow. Besides, status table is also dynamically updated to adapt to the change of the flows in the network. Experimental results show this routing algorithm could increase the throughput by up to 40% and decrease the flow completion time by about 30%. The maximum flow routing algorithm achieves good performance even in heterogeneous path environment and high network load. The dynamic update of the status table could also improve the routing robustness of the network.