EC-Elastic an Explicit Congestion Control Mechanism for Named Data Networking

Abstract

In recent years, Named Data Networking (NDN) has attracted researchers' attention as a new internet architecture. NDN changes the internet communication paradigm from a host-to-host IP model to a name-based model. Thus, NDN permits the retrieval of requested content by name, from different sources and via multiple paths, and the use of caching in intermediate routers. These features transform the transport control model from sender to receiver and make traditional end-to-end congestion control mechanisms incompatible with NDN architecture. To deal with this problem, a reliable congestion control mechanism becomes necessary for a successful deployment of NDN. This paper presents a new hybrid congestion control mechanism for NDN, EC-Elastic (Explicit Congestion Elastic), which adopts the basic concept of Elastic-TCP to control the sending rates of the interest packets at the consumer nodes. In the intermediate nodes, a queue has been associated with the Controlled Delay-Active Queue Management CoDel-AQM to measure the packet sojourn time and notify the consumer to decrease its interest packet sending rate when it receives an explicit congestion signal. EC-Elastic was implemented in ndnSIM and evaluated with Agile-SD, CUBIC, and STCP in different scenarios. Simulation results show that EC-Elastic provides a significant improvement in bandwidth utilization while maintaining lower delay and packet loss rates.