Active request management in stateful forwarding networks

Internet usage has evolved toward the delivery of rich multimedia content to users who are interested in the content itself rather than its address or location. To address this, the named data networking (NDN) architecture has been designed based upon a content-centric communication model rather than the traditional host-centric communication model. NDN has the distinctive features of receiver-driven, connectionless communication, and stateful forwarding transport. These features enable multicast-natured, multi-source, and multipath content deliveries, but they raise new challenges regarding congestion control mechanisms. We found that there is no existing study that satisfies all the following requirements: low queuing delay, fast loss recovery, efficient multipath usage, and low control overhead. In this paper, we present an active request management (ARM) scheme to proactively control congestion by taking advantage of the NDN stateful forwarding property. ARM allows routers to randomly drop request packets instead of dropping data packets, and to utilize multipath transport efficiently without requiring high overhead operations such as rate limiting per flow (or per name prefix). Using an ndnSIM simulator based on NS-3, we evaluated ARM with previous related works. ARM showed the shortest flow completion time for retrieving small-size content, while concurrently achieving the highest throughput for large-size content transfers. In terms of multipath communication, ARM presented a higher aggregate and had better stability. We also demonstrated that when using the stateful forwarding property it is easy to implement producer-driven differentiated services.