Joint hop-by-hop and receiver-driven interest control protocol for content-centric networks

Content-centric networking (CCN) advocates a new transport model tailored to named-data communication. Three features distinguish CCN transport from the TCP/IP model: unique endpoint at the receiver, pull-based data retrieval in a point to multi-point fashion and in-path caching.

The definition of transport control mechanisms is of fundamental importance within the CCN architectural design and beyond, in the broader scope of information-centric networks. In this work, we propose a joint Hop-by-hop and Receiver-driven Interest Control Protocol (HR-ICP) to regulate user requests (Interests) either at the receiver and at intermediate nodes via Interest shaping. We prove that HR-ICP is stable and converges to an efficient and max-min fair equilibrium. Compared to controlling traffic only at the receiver, HR-ICP accelerates congestion reaction and reduces the loss rate, as we show by means of CCN packet-level simulations. In different network scenarios, we highlight the advantages of our solution in terms of faster convergence to the optimal throughput, robustness against misbehaving receivers and flow protection of delay-sensitive applications.