A proactive transport mechanism with Explicit Congestion Notification for NDN

Named Data Networking (NDN) shifts the communication paradigm from the quest of where the content is to what content is to be consumed. In such a new Internet architecture, transmission control mechanisms are of particular importance and have to be carefully designed to enable efficient data transmission. Existing work advocates the use of TCP-like reactive mechanisms for NDN transmission control. In this paper, we show that the statefull and adaptive forwarding properties of NDN makes proactive and efficient mechanisms for transmission control possible. We achieve this by using Explicit Congestion Notifications (ECN), which explicitly notify content consumers about network conditions through the communication path. Specifically, we propose an ECN-based proactive interest-sending rate control mechanism, which aims to achieve a high link utilisation for fast data transmission as well as a low packet dropping rate. To have a globally optimal data transmission, we further propose a smart forwarding mechanism, which locally utilises network-wide information to select the forwarding paths for individual flows. Extensive packet-level simulations in ndnSIM demonstrate that the ECN-based approach, coupled with smart forwarding, outperforms TCP-like reactive mechanisms in terms of link utilisation, packet dropping rate and flow completion time.