An Interest Shaping Mechanism in NDN: Joint Congestion Control and Traffic Management

Congestion control is one of the most critical issues in Named Data Networking (NDN). Compared to traditional Internet, NDN has some new features: receiver-driven, in-network caching, hop-by-hop forwarding, etc. These new features pose new challenges for designing congestion control mechanism. Congestion in NDN is mainly caused by Data packets, thus, shaping the transmission rate of Interest packet can regulate the returning rate of Data packet. In this paper, we propose an Interest shaping mechanism to tackle congestion in NDN by controlling Interest packet transmission rate in an optimized way. We formulate the rate allocation problem as a global optimization problem via jointly considering congestion control and traffic management. In order to achieve traffic management objective, we add an extra term in utility function to penalize over-loaded links. By applying partial dual decomposition, we solve the optimization problem with a gradient-based algorithm and we prove that gradient-based algorithm converges to optimality of optimization. Then, we present a practical implementation of this algorithm. Finally, we conduct simulation in ndnSIM to evaluate performance of the proposed mechanism by comparing with other existing methods. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism can achieve high ratio of satisfied Interest, low delay and packet drop rate. The proposed mechanism can also achieve fairness among flows though the link utilization may not be high.