A transport protocol for content-centric networking with explicit congestion control

Abstract

Content-centric networking (CCN) adopts a receiver-driven, hop-by-hop transport approach that facilitates in-network caching, which in turn leads to multiple sources and multiple paths for transferring content. In such a case, keeping a single round trip time (RTT) estimator for a multi-path flow is insufficient as each path may experience different round trip times. To solve this problem, it has been proposed to use multiple RTT estimators to predict network condition. In this paper, we examine an alternative approach to this problem, CHoPCoP, which utilizes explicit congestion control to cope with the multiple-source, multiple-path situation. Protocol design innovations of CHoPCoP include a random early marking (REM) scheme that explicitly signals network congestion, and a per-hop fair share Interest shaping algorithm (FISP) and a receiver Interest control method (RIC) that regulate the Interest rates at routers and the receiver respectively. We have implemented CHoPCoP on the ORBIT testbed and conducted experiments under various network and traffic settings. The evaluation shows that CHoPCoP is a viable approach that can effectively deal with congestion in the multipath environment.