Intelligent forwarding strategy for congestion control using Q-learning and LSTM in named data networking

Abstract

Named data networking (NDN) is a future network architecture that replaces IP-oriented communication with content-oriented communication and has new features such as cache, multiple paths, and multiple sources. Services such as video streaming, to which NDN can be applied in the future, can cause congestion if data is concentrated on one of the nodes during high demand. To solve this problem, sending rate control methods such as TCP congestion control have been proposed, but they do not adequately reflect the characteristics of NDN. Therefore, we use reinforcement learning and deep learning to propose a congestion control method that takes advantage of multipath features. The intelligent forwarding strategy for congestion control using Q-learning and long short-term memory in NDN proposed in this paper is divided into two phases. The first phase uses an LSTM model to train a pending interest table (PIT) entry rate that can be used as an indicator to detect congestion by knowing the amount of data returned. In the second phase, it is forwarded to an alternative path that is not congestive via Q-learning based on the PIT entry rate predicted by the trained LSTM model. The simulation results show that the proposed method increases the data reception rate by 6.5% and 19.5% and decreases the packet drop rate by 7.3% and 17.2% compared to an adaptive SRTT-based forwarding strategy (ASF) and BestRoute.