End-to-end active queue management with Named-Data Networking

The innovative information-based Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture provides a good opportunity to rethink many of the design decisions that are taken for granted in the Internet today. For example, active queue management (AQM) tasks have been traditionally implemented in the routers to alleviate network congestion before their buffers fill up. However, AQM operations could be performed on an end-to-end basis by taking advantage of NDN features. In this paper, we provide an implementation of an AQM algorithm for the NDN architecture that we use to drive a classical AIMD-based congestion control protocol at the receivers. To accomplish this, we take advantage of the 64-bit Congestion Mark field present in the link layer of NDN packets to encode both rate and delay information about each transmission queue along a network path. In order to make the solution scalable, this information is delivered stochastically, guaranteeing that receivers get accurate and updated information about every pertinent queue. This information is enough to implement the well-known controlled delay (CoDel) AQM algorithm. Simulation results show that our client-located CoDel implementation is able to react to congestion when the bottleneck queuing delay surpasses the 5 ms target set by the usual in-network CoDel implementation and, at the same time, get a fair and efficient share of the available transmission capacity.

Automated summary

This paper presents an implementation of an active queue management (AQM) algorithm for the Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture and its application in congestion control protocols. By utilizing the congestion mark field in NDN packets, information about each transmission queue is encoded to achieve a scalable AQM solution.