Hop-by-Hop Congestion Measurement and Practical Active Queue Management in NDN

Abstract

Content replication and name-based routing in Named Data Network (NDN) naturally lead to connectionless multi-source and multipath transmissions. Traditional congestion control designed for end-to-end connections cannot well fit this architecture. Explicit congestion notification (ECN) can better support NDN because congestion is detected where it occurs and ECN can timely notify the traffic initiator of congestion. NDN can be deployed as an overlay protocol (sharing the underlying devices with other protocols), which means the congestion may also occur at an underlying device (e.g. a switch). In this case, the NDN nodes cannot access the queue or other link status at a remote underlying device for congestion detection. A promising ECN scheme must be able to detect congestion happening anywhere (at an NDN node or an underlying device) without using underlying link information. This paper proposes Hop-byHop Congestion Measurement (HbHCM) and Practical Active Queue Management (PAQM) to enable detecting congestion and generating ECN at NDN nodes via monitoring the change of transmission delays. HbHCM measures the transmission delay at the hop level and PAQM converts the delay to ECN signals to notify consumers. We compared HbHCM + PAQM with two milestone solutions (router-label and ECN-based). The simulation results show that HbHCM + PAQM can accurately detect congestion, improve bandwidth utilisation and better support multipath transmission, no need to rely on route or link information.