A Delay-Based Congestion-Control Protocol for Information-Centric Networks

The Delay-based Congestion-control Protocol (DCP) is presented. DCP is designed to detect and control congestion at the consumer end of a network based on an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture without the use of round-trip time measurements or additional congestion signaling. DCP is based on a receiver-driven, window-based approach to congestion control using measurements of delays along the forwarding path from a producer or caching site to a consumer. DCP was implemented using the ndnSim simulator and compared to two other protocols, namely: an end-to-end protocol that behaves in the same way as TCP, and a pure implementation of the Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT) algorithm as a congestion-control protocol for ICN's. The results clearly show that DCP outperforms LEDBAT when caching is involved. We evaluate the known latecomer-advantage problem that exists in LEDBAT in the context of an ICN architecture and address how DCP can overcome this issue.