Jointly optimized congestion control, forwarding strategy,and link scheduling in a named-data multihop wireless network

As a promising future network architecture, named data networking(NDN) has been widely considered as a very appropriate network protocol for the multihop wireless network(MWN). In named-data MWNs, congestion control is a critical issue. Independent optimization for congestion control may cause severe performance degradation if it can not cooperate well with protocols in other layers. Cross-layer congestion control is a potential method to enhance performance. There have been many cross-layer congestion control mechanisms for MWN with Internet Protocol(IP). However, these cross-layer mechanisms for MWNs with IP are not applicable to named-data MWNs because the communication characteristics of NDN are different from those of IP. In this paper, we study the joint congestion control, forwarding strategy, and link scheduling problem for named-data MWNs. The problem is modeled as a network utility maximization(NUM) problem. Based on the approximate subgradient algorithm, we propose an algorithm called ‘jointly optimized congestion control, forwarding strategy, and link scheduling(JOCFS)’to solve the NUM problem distributively and iteratively. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first cross-layer congestion control mechanism for named-data MWNs. By comparison with the existing congestion control mechanism, JOCFS can achieve a better performance in terms of network throughput, fairness, and the pending interest table(PIT) size.