SAID: A Control Protocol for Scalable and Adaptive Information Dissemination in ICN

TL;DR

SAID is a novel ICN control protocol that separates reliability from congestion control, enabling scalable, fair, and efficient data dissemination for heterogeneous receivers by allowing flexible packet requests and cooperative repair.

Contribution

It introduces a new control protocol that decouples reliability from congestion control, improving scalability and fairness in ICN data dissemination.

Findings

Enhanced data transmission efficiency at initial request

Fairness achieved among heterogeneous receivers

Reliable delivery through cooperative repair

Abstract

Information dissemination applications (video, news, social media, etc.) with large number of receivers need to be efficient but also have limited loss tolerance. The new Information-Centric Networks (ICN) paradigm offers an alternative approach for reliably delivering data by naming content and exploiting data available at any intermediate point (e.g., caches). However, receivers are often heterogeneous, with widely varying receive rates. When using existing ICN congestion control mechanisms with in-sequence delivery, a particularly thorny problem of receivers going out-of-sync results in inefficiency and unfairness with heterogeneous receivers. We argue that separating reliability from congestion control leads to more scalable, efficient and fair data dissemination, and propose SAID, a Control Protocol for Scalable and Adaptive Information Dissemination in ICN. To maximize the amount of data transmitted at the first attempt, receivers request any next packet (ANP) of a flow instead of next-in-sequence packet, independent of the provider's transmit rate. This allows providers to transmit at an application-efficient rate, without being limited by the slower receivers. SAID ensures reliable delivery to all receivers eventually, by cooperative repair, while preserving privacy without unduly trusting other receivers.